Cinema
Old timers
Peter Ackroyd
Hammett ('AA', Lumiere, St Martin's Lane)
6 Dames like her, they live on trouble.' Sure, Hammett. 'But you can't forget her, ever.' It's getting rather misty down here, on this new film set, but 'Dash' just loves making flat, sardonic little remarks as he peers into the lights of nearby Chinatown. And here she comes, as neat and glossy as a tin of shoe-polish: 'Do you want a bellyful of daylight?' I think he is checking an old number of Black Masks to remember how the dialogue goes. 'You're bad, sister, evil through and through. How does it feel, sister?' The bodies start falling like hail on the back of a cigarette packet. I'm sorry, I must have fallen asleep and dreamed my own script. The last thing I remember is the taxi-cab driver saying something snappy and yet somehow lovable — did you know it is the same actor who played the part of the cab driver in The Maltese Falcon? — and then suddenly everything was more noir than film.
Hammett, based upon the novel of the same name, is an exercise in imaginary biography. In 1928, Dashiell Hammett is still a struggling writer living in San Fran- cisco when by accident he finds himself enmired in a saga of crime and detection which resembles one of his own stories. But even Hammett himself would have had dif- ficulty in unravelling the complications in- volved in the making of this film. The original idea came from Francis Ford Cop- pola, the enfant terrible of Hollywood who has at least managed to live up to the first part of his title. Nicolas Roeg was announc- ed as the director, only to be replaced by the German Wim Wenders. The film went through several scriptwriters, actors and production staff, during the course of five years' interrupted shooting which has pro- duced a lot of Wim but no vigour.
It opens with Dashiell Hammett sitting at his typewriter; naturally, the blinds are
The Spectator 16 October 1982 drawn. Played here by Frederic Forrest, he is just as seedy as you would imagine an ex- Pinkerton detective to be. A cigarette in one hand and a whisky in the other, he must have finished his latest story with his toes: certainly the scenes from it, which form a prologue to the actual film, look rather clumsy. It has something to do with Sue Alabama — 'Sex is all that she ever needed' and a pearl necklace. It is very close to parody — and who could resist parodying that mannered 'macho' style, which gilds the thoughts of Hemingway upon the feel- ings of L. Frank Baum? And yet since Hammett itself adopts the same tone and uses much the same dialogue, parody was obviously considered a grossly insensitive way of employing this master of modem fiction. What we get, instead, is an 'affec- tionate homage' — in other words,
a self' conscious pastiche.
As soon as he has finished the story, Dashiell Hammett is visited by an old c01- league from Pinkerton's who asks for his help in the search for a missing Chinese pro- stitute — her name, I think, is Sugar LaY,. To the accompaniment of nicotine-stained and drink-sodden jazz, we are led through the opium dens and brothels of Chinatown. Crooked policemen and perverted tycoons appear from time to time as Harnolett follows the track of a financial and sexual mcounrsdpeirrsa.cy. It ends with a couple t. The plot, however, is less important than the manner of the film since this is Willi Wenders's personal tribute to Harnmett, and to the pictures which are in part derived from his fiction. Hammett is full of nt°° and atmosphere — Babe Ruth posters 00 the walls, the right kind of clothes and the right kind of cars. In fact there is s° much atmosphere that there is hardly room for anything else. The characters ate, so hemmed in by so much period detail that the film is closer to costume drama than to anything else, and can only move at a funereal pace. Dashiell Hammett was, according to the, credits, the writer 'who helped to get murder out of the vicar's rose garden a°1:14 back with the people who were really g°°", at it'; but he could hardly have that it would end up in the lap of film buffs t who are so preoccupied with the exact camera angle used in the Forties remake To Have and Have Not, or the quality °It lighting used in that particular sh° when ... , that they would hardly notice a murder at all. But as a result this film has about as much excitement as a cigarette commercial. It is more picturesque than picaresque, concerned with visual attrac- tiveness rather than the demands of the, expected plot, and with a script so ornate an u_ platitudinous that it is nothing short of a miracle that the actors could speak it. t They struggle valiantly through it all, bti . the odds are against them. Frederic Forrest looks like a bookie's runner and sounds Bogart played at the wrong speed; he ,hae neither the style nor the presence to pia'', his own particular stamp upon the finished Product. Unless you are a very fine actor indeed, it is a mistake to take on so stereotypical a role — as Roy Kinnear must now realise, to his cost. He is asked to play here the part of Sidney Greenstreet, in almost a straight crib of that actor's lines and gestures. It is as if a garden gnome had been asked to mimic Humpty Dumpty. But the central failure of this film is the one that Most markedly distinguishes it from its illustrious predecessors: Hammett cannot tell a story. Here the interest in unravelling the intricate plot is a mechanical and Uninspired one, and what we get instead is a self-conscious exercise in atmospherics Which proves only that there is more to successful films than a facility for making Pretty pictures.
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