There is nothing more irritating than a high-concept art film. Except, perhaps, a botched one.
You need to have a very good reason to make a movie featuring Dashiell Hammett as a 'real detective'. It is a twee and obvious idea. (It was called Murder She Wrote and it ran for years on the telly, where it worked perfectly.) But a serious 'A' feature, with a star director? Presumably the point would be to show the 'real' people on whom Dash Hammett based his fictional characters.
But instead, here we see Hammett surrounded by people doing largely uninspired impersonations of characters from old Hammett movies. A decrepit Elijah Cook Jr. drives a cab to the same apartment building he inhabited in 'The Maltese Falcon', where another twitchy gunsel waits with a fake Sydney Greenstreet. The fake sets look like fake sets from the Warner's backlot.
Because it's all a copy of a copy, everything seems pallid: Roy Kinnear simply reminds us how depraved and scary Greenstreet originally was. The only way for this film to be viable was to find someone even scarier than Greenstreet: to show us how Hammett 'tidied reality up' in his fiction. Instead, we get a pointless pastiche.
What might conceivably have saved this is a performance of blistering charisma in the title role. I suspect Frederic Forest is absolute dynamite in the live theatre; here, he comes across as miscast. (Imagine Sam Spade played by Tom Hanks, and you'll be in the right ballpark). What an odd person to choose to replace Brian Keith. (And wasn't Brian Keith a weird person to choose in the first place?) There's a short tantalising 'dream sequence' at the end as Hammett converts his recent experiences into a completely different plot from the one we have just seen. Wonder if these are clippings from the 'lost version'? Anyway, it's the nicest piece of whimsy in the whole film. Otherwise, it feels flat and style-free, and it simply lacks elan. Fassbinder used to knock out things like this over a weekend; this feels arduous. (God it would be tiresome for all concerned to reshoot a whole movie. Particularly if it's for Yankee bankers who presumably want it all 'dumbed down'...) Wim Wenders. If you've seen 'Burden of Dreams', you'll know he looked a lot like his title character when this was made. Does it mean anything?
You need to have a very good reason to make a movie featuring Dashiell Hammett as a 'real detective'. It is a twee and obvious idea. (It was called Murder She Wrote and it ran for years on the telly, where it worked perfectly.) But a serious 'A' feature, with a star director? Presumably the point would be to show the 'real' people on whom Dash Hammett based his fictional characters.
But instead, here we see Hammett surrounded by people doing largely uninspired impersonations of characters from old Hammett movies. A decrepit Elijah Cook Jr. drives a cab to the same apartment building he inhabited in 'The Maltese Falcon', where another twitchy gunsel waits with a fake Sydney Greenstreet. The fake sets look like fake sets from the Warner's backlot.
Because it's all a copy of a copy, everything seems pallid: Roy Kinnear simply reminds us how depraved and scary Greenstreet originally was. The only way for this film to be viable was to find someone even scarier than Greenstreet: to show us how Hammett 'tidied reality up' in his fiction. Instead, we get a pointless pastiche.
What might conceivably have saved this is a performance of blistering charisma in the title role. I suspect Frederic Forest is absolute dynamite in the live theatre; here, he comes across as miscast. (Imagine Sam Spade played by Tom Hanks, and you'll be in the right ballpark). What an odd person to choose to replace Brian Keith. (And wasn't Brian Keith a weird person to choose in the first place?) There's a short tantalising 'dream sequence' at the end as Hammett converts his recent experiences into a completely different plot from the one we have just seen. Wonder if these are clippings from the 'lost version'? Anyway, it's the nicest piece of whimsy in the whole film. Otherwise, it feels flat and style-free, and it simply lacks elan. Fassbinder used to knock out things like this over a weekend; this feels arduous. (God it would be tiresome for all concerned to reshoot a whole movie. Particularly if it's for Yankee bankers who presumably want it all 'dumbed down'...) Wim Wenders. If you've seen 'Burden of Dreams', you'll know he looked a lot like his title character when this was made. Does it mean anything?