inioi Wim Wenders did an excellent job with this movie.The only possible difference with the old classics is that the film is filmed in colour. The sets recreates amazingly the atmosphere of the real film noir. The story and the acting works on the same good level, and special mention to th excellent music score of John Barry.I would like to highlight the fact of the movie also shows the personal life of Hammett: his humble apartment, his neighborhood, his alcohol problems, his girlfriend....which makes the story believable.Not just for film noir lovers, but for people who loves cinema in general.

seymourblack-1 Samuel Dashiell Hammett played a huge part in popularising the hardboiled detective stories which were responsible for changing the existing style of crime fiction in the 1920s and also strongly influenced the works of certain other prominent crime writers who followed him (e.g. Raymond Chandler, James M Cain etc.). Hammett's characters and stories were largely drawn from his own experiences as a detective working for the Pinkerton Agency and his hardboiled style was almost certainly a product of his Pinkerton's training which emphasised the need for agents to remain totally objective at all times to ensure that their judgement was not impaired by emotional involvement with the victims of crimes etc. As Pinkerton agents were also encouraged to do whatever was necessary to bring criminals to justice without being too concerned about normal standards of decency or morality, it's quite likely that this inspired the cynicism and moral ambiguity that also featured in his work.The movie "Hammett" (1982) is essentially an homage to the kind of fiction that provided a great deal of material for the films noir that influenced German director Wim Wenders so strongly during his childhood and focuses on the author's career where he'd already left the Pinkerton Agency and was selling his stories to crime magazines such as "Black Mask". It provides a fictionalised account of how he might have reluctantly got drawn into an investigation being carried out by an old friend and by so doing, gained the inspiration he needed to write one of his most successful novels.In San Francisco in 1928, crime-writer Dashiell Hammett (Frederic Forrest), (known to his friends as Sam), has just completed his latest story when he's visited by Jimmy Ryan (Peter Boyle) who was his mentor during his time at Pinkerton's. Jimmy taught Sam everything he knows about detective work and is now working on a missing person's case involving a Chinese girl who's been a victim of the slave trade and could be in imminent danger. Sam doesn't want to get involved but feels obliged to because, in the past, Jimmy saved his life by taking a bullet that was intended for him.The investigation takes the two men into the dangerous Chinatown underworld where Sam quickly finds that he hasn't forgotten some of the old skills that he learned at Pinkerton's. Things don't go as planned though when Sam loses his latest manuscript and Jimmy has to work alone to track down the young Crystal Ling (Lydia Lei). Trying to solve the mystery of Crystal's disappearance leads to brushes with corrupt cops and beatings before Sam discovers some pornography, prostitution and blackmail rackets that involve a number of wealthy people in influential positions in the city.Hammett is depicted as a laconic, heavy drinker who suffers alarming bouts of coughing because he's a TB sufferer. Before getting involved in the Chinatown investigation, he'd used Jimmy as a hero in his stories and his attractive downstairs neighbour Kit (Marilu Henner) as a key character called Sue Alabama. During his time in Chinatown however, he becomes involved with a whole series of people who are immediately recognisable as ones that later feature in his best known works.Despite the movie's well-documented production problems, the end-result looks well-directed, skilfully photographed and successfully evokes the atmosphere of the classic noirs. Its main deficiencies are a shortage of the witty repartee that's normally a feature of these types of stories and also a lack of realism that's caused by virtually everything being filmed in the studios. Frederic Forrest makes a convincing Hammett and the supporting cast is also very strong.

chaos-rampant I didn't really expect my first forray into Wenders to be a fictionalized pulpy detective story homage to the patriarch of pulpy detective stories, writer Dashiell Hammett, produced by Coppola's Zoetrope Studios, but there you have it. Strangely, I'm not even sure this is a Wenders film in anything but name, as Coppola himself allegedly had to reshoot one and a half years after Wenders wrapped shooting significant portions of a film his backers found very 'dissatisfying'. Par the course for a film that had to undergo so much revamping to please money men, Hammett is a mess, albeit an interesting mess.If the premise sounds good enough, pulpy writer Dashiell Hammett being drawn one last time into his detective past as a favour to a former Pinkerton colleague whom he helps investigate the disappearance of an underage Chinese prostitute, the script never quite fulfills its potential. Not because it's sprawling and convoluted (the best noirs usually are), but because it's just that for all the wrong reasons, and on top of that half-baked and unconvincing. At times it plays almost like a Dick Tracy caricature of noir plots.Most interesting thing about it however are the meta- aspects of the story, probably what drew Wenders into the fold (apart from his fascination with American genre cinema). Writer Hammett playing detective Hammett, the lines between reality and fiction blurring dangerously as he does. But the film never runs with it, as though afraid it might alienate a mainstream audience that likely had little vested interest in such a film to begin with.The opening sequence shows what might have been: having just finished his latest novel, Hammett lies down playing out the ending in his head; after a violent coughing fit, he staggers back into his living room only to find waiting for him the hero of his book. Is Hammett hallucinating in the grip of alcohol and tuberculosis or does he base his fictional characters on people he knows? The ending tries to bring all that back full circle but it's too little too late. The movie has dawdled a little too much in squeaky clean Zoetrope sets trying to pass for 1920's San Francisco, has tripped over the needlessly convoluted mess it creates for its characters. It's still a fun watch, the cast is populated by familiar faces (three Twin Peaks actors, Sam Fuller, Elisha Cook Jr.), and Frederic Forrest gives a good show. Interesting curio, not much else, Hammett fans will probably dig it significantly more than me.

launchd-2 Watched Coppola/Wim Wender's "Hammett" again this past w/e- the film grows on me- has a flavour I like- the detective genre mixed with post-turn of the 20th century San Francisco- and the fact that SO MUCH is done on soundstages gives it a surreal quality. The film's production history has always been interesting (Frederick Forrest and Marilu Henner got married and divorced during it's long, tumultuous halt-run production). But, if you have never seen this or heard the John Barry score- you should. At least the score. It's to be placed in the Barry category called "unusual"- piano melodic and a lot of strained strings prevail- giving it a gin-soaked, withdrawn feel that still tugs through a foggy SF even when it's clear. A dubious above-ground underworld sucks all the characters and audience into a not-so-licentious but rather everyday (same then as today) corrupt city power structure. The film and score play off of each other, intertwining, massaging and playing out a tale of woe, misbegotten friendship and a lusty disgust for those in-power at that unique place by the bay. If ANYthing can be said of this film- it's that it has character-a-plenty and that includes the score