Some thoughts on Hammett (1982)

A troubled production and genetically-confused origins are to blame for this unpolished and overscripted failure, which feels like cheap television but wants to be Chinatown. The miasma led the great New York Times critic Vincent Canby to write: "heaven only knows what it's supposed to be about or why it was made". In its conceit of the detective-writer turning detective it doesn't even work as pastiche (which it's not meant to be in any case), and its presumptions towards John Huston's 1941 film version of Hammett's The Maltese Falcon fail miserably. Hammett's men of nails are replaced by catamites, cabalistic capitalists, and giggling concubines, and his masterfully laconic descriptions are reduced to hackneyed gin-joints and necessarily foggy wharves. 

In trying to figure out why Hammett is surrounded by these people and what they're meant to be doing, you can easily miss the fact that most of the performances are actually excellent. The elderly duo of Elisha Cook (who played the young punk in Huston's film), and Sylvia Sidney (who also acted alongside Bogart that year in the disappointing The Wagons Roll at Night) remind us how pathetic this film stands next to the film noir greats. A not-excellent, but not-uninteresting, performance comes from Marilu Henner, the female lead, a librarian. For those who would maintain that film librarians are overworked stereotypes, you'd be hard-pressed to work out which boilerplate she's stamped from. She's one of the only original characters, who spends most of the film lounging around Hammett's apartment in a state of partial undress, or visualized in his daydreamed stories as a tough independent woman, holding her own in a world of gangsters, corrupt cops, and mean gumshoes. She drinks whiskey, dries her knickers on a line outside her front door, never talks about (or goes to) work, and is untroubled by the sight of blood. In fact, she's the most Hammett-like character in the whole film. Given the robustness of his fictional creations, one must wonder what on earth the filmmakers thought they were adding by fictionalizing the detective's own life, turning him into a cipher and the stories he created into plywooded melodrama.