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				Label: Manga Films Salesrank: 214022
		Our Price: $25.99
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		MPAA Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested) Media: DVD

Editorial Review:
Spain released, PAL/Region 2 DVD: it WILL NOT play on standard US DVD player. You need multi-region PAL/NTSC DVD player to view it in USA/Canada: LANGUAGES: English ( Dolby Digital 2.0 ), Spanish ( Mono ), Spanish ( Subtitles ), ANAMORPHIC WIDESCREEN (1.85:1), SPECIAL FEATURES: Filmographies, Interactive Menu, Photo Gallery, Scene Access, Trailer(s), SYNOPSIS: Wim Wenders' film version of Joe Gores' novel, a conflation of elements of the writer's life with episodes from his work, is a fascinatingly stylized artifact which will likely be of more interest to the director's fans than Hammett's. More a meditation on the detective genre than an actual detective film, it bends Gores' novel to the deliberate pacing and meandering plotting of Wenders' characteristic theme of perennial wanderjahre. The casting of an actor with a persona as vulnerable as Frederic Forrest to play the laconic, hard-nosed Hammett of reality is just one of many unusual choices that take one into the realm of cult film and Marilu Henner, Forrest's wife of the time, also seems out of place here. But the rest of the cast, which includes veterans of Hollywood's golden age like Sylvia Sidney, Elisha Cook Jr., and Royal Dano, acquit themselves well. Philip Lathrop, a specialist in noir and crime films, and the 79-year-old Joseph Biroc, whose last feature this was, combine their talents in the film's stunningly dream-like visual texture.
SCREENED/AWARDED AT: Cannes Film Festival,

Hammett [Region 2] Reviews:
A Missed Op
2009-02-15 - Not a true biopic and not a real adaptation, just a good-looking drag. The picture's like Frederick Forest's take on the lead character. It looks remarkably authentic, but doesn't hold the interest for long. (Do scenes of writers at work ever really succeed on screen?) While the picture opens with Chandler's lauding Hammett's groundbreaking work, all we see here are cliches in action. We never get a sense of what he was rendering at the time that was different than what others were doing or noticeably realistic. We end up with scenes we've seen a hundred times before and some that explicitly foreshadow better bits in the Falcon. Dean Tavoularis' art direction looks terrific though, and there's some good John Barry scoring.

Very Disappointing
2008-10-23 - I love noir! The Glass Key, Laura, Big Sleep, etc. I think Double Indemnity might be the best movie ever made. I even love noir B movies like Dark Passage, Night Editor, D.O.A. I like Frederic Forest, Peter Boyle, Dashiell Hammett, San Francisco and I have a soft spot for exploited Chinese girls. But I hated this movie. Forest and Boyle are very good actors, Joe Gores, who wrote the book on which the movie was based is a good writer and nobody ever looked better in a nightie than a twenty-something Marilu Henner. So, what went wrong? I blame the director and the scriptwriter. The story is convoluted and boring where good noir is convoluted and fascinating. The movie plays, and looks, more like a theatrical play than a film. I'm not sure they even let the paint dry on the sets before they started filming. When Hammett is being shadowed by The Punk, doing a "if I'm on my tippy-toes I'm not only silent but invisible" thing, I nearly laughed. When the Chinese girl explains to Hammett that she's been saved by Christ right after tounging him and promising to do "anything he wants" (wink, wink) I groaned. This one of those movies where I was never certain if they were playing it straight or for laughs. Based on their performances I think the actors were in the same boat. If they'd gotten Madeline Kahn to play the Chinese hooker this would have been a good vehicle for Mel Brooks. But this is not noir.

One of the hundred best films ever made.
2008-05-30 - Hammett (Wim Wenders, 1982)

Wim Wenders directs Frederic Forrest in a fictionalized biopic about Dashiell Hammett. What can possibly go wrong? Add in a number of other character actors equally as good as Forrest (including Elisha Cook, Jr.-- yeah, the guy who was in The Maltese Falcon as the gunsel) and a script by the late Ross Thomas, who wrote a pretty mean crime novel himself, and you're pretty much destined for cinema gold. Needless to say, the public ignored it-- the film grossed a total of forty-two thousand dollars in the theaters. In the intervening twenty-six years, the film has been criminally neglected, held up as a paragon of cinema virtue by a handful (at best) of fanatics, including myself and megacritic Jonathan Rosenbaum (who considers Hammett Wenders' most underrated film; I'd have to say that's kind of a gimme), who are, in this case at least, profoundly ignored. Well, it's time that that stops, and Hammett is brought back to the place where it belongs, as one of the best films ever made.

No one except Wim Wenders, Francis Ford Coppola, and (one assumes) a few selected folks at Zoetrope has ever actually seen Hammett. Once Zoetrope got a copy of it, they recut the film (Wenders is on record as saying the released version is very little like the film he actually shot) to Coppola's standards. That's what got released, and that's what we've all seen. Well, the eighteen or so of us who've seen it, anyway. And I have to say, with as much salt as necessary given that, say, the director's cut of Apocalypse Now is godawful compared to the original, that if Wenders is correct and Coppola basically destroyed the movie, then my god, what a masterpiece it must have been, because Coppola's cut is still just as much a spectacular screwball comedy/crime story now that I'm watching it in 2008 as it was when I first saw it in 1983 (on HBO, I think). I have a lot more film-watching experience thanks to the intervening fifteen years, and I'm relatively certain it's not just a case of nostalgia; this is a really, really great film that's just been profoundly ignored by, well, everyone. Frederic Forrest, who's long been one of America's finest character actors, plays Dashiell Hammett, who should put one in mind of Hammett's more famous characters. Peter Bole is his old pal Jimmy Ryan, who comes to him with a vague, and somewhat incomplete, tale of a missing Chinese prostitute, Crystal Ling (Lydia Lei), and asks Hammett to help him find her. We get the usual "I'm retired from detective work, blah blah blah" speech before the two head out, and quickly find that tracking down Crystal Ling will step on pretty much everyone's toes. Before long Hammett and Ryan get separated, and now it's personal, since Ryan seems to have disappeared, and Hammett is left with only the help of his gorgeous neighbor Kit (Marilu Henner), a schoolteacher who knows nothing at all about detective work, and an ex-yippie cabbie (Cook Jr.).

It would, of course, be an abomination to compare Wenders' Hammett to Huston's The Maltese Falcon, but indulge me as I draw the wrath of the film gods, for Wenders' movie has all the spit and crackle of Huston's, but without Huston's meddling with the characters (and the famously blown ending). The usually laconic Forrest hams it up in true wiseguy style, while Peter Boyle, whom I don't think I've ever seen play a tough guy before, absolutely owns his role. I could just keep on going down the list of impressive performances (David Patrick Kelly, Henner, Jack Nance, Lei, Cook Jr., Roy Kinnear, cameos from Samuel Fuller and Hank Worden, and oh so much more), or talk about Wenders' directorial style, which always shines through in a Wenders film, or the awesome script, or the many, many in-jokes to both Hammett's writing and the various film adaptations of it (and a final answer to the question of the double-meaning of "gunsel"), or any of the other things that make this movie an absolute delight to watch. But I won't, because I've already talked too much when you should be going out, right now, and renting the recent and long, long overdue DVD release of this brilliant, brilliant movie. **** ½


Story within a story..within a story...within a story
2008-02-09 - It is a story ...within a story...within a...

If you don't understand, then check out how in the opening scene the writer's clothing and entire presentation change.

The film is a story about a writer who's writing a story about a writer who gets involved in all the action of the movie. But there is at least one more layer below that!

So THAT explains a lot of the look and feel of the film.

A half-decent man in a 9/10ths dishonest world
2007-11-13 - It's tempting to see Hammett as a real life variation of The American Friend with Francis Ford Coppola as Dennis Hopper's Ripley and Wim Wenders as Bruno Ganz's picture framer who gets conned into becoming a hitman. Part of Francis Ford Coppola's ill-fated attempt to recreate the old studio system with a stock company of players and his own studio, Zoetrope, that had a troubled history to match any of his own directorial efforts, the wunderkind lured Wenders to Hollywood with the promise of artistic freedom in an artist-friendly environment with Joe Gores' fictional novel about the revolutionary crime writer and former private eye Dashiell Hammett getting involved in a semi-fictional mystery involving the cops, the crooks and the big rich while writing Red Harvest as bait. Set in 1928 San Francisco, it presents the tubercular Hammett as a half-decent man in a 9/10ths dishonest world who's given up the detective racket for short stories for pulp magazines, drinking too much and coughing his lungs up all the way until his old mentor turns up to call in a favor that leads to a web of murder, corruption and blackmail, it's easy to see the attraction. Instead things went a little haywire...

When the film was in development in 1978, Wenders had originally wanted Sam Shepherd - not only was he gaunt enough to play Hammett and was a writer himself but, more importantly for the director, he could actually type, something most actors who tested for the film had real problems with. Instead, Coppola wanted Frederic Forrest, one of his stock company of actors at Zoetrope, to play the lead: it turned out to be an inspired choice, but was indicative of how far the film would veer from his original intentions. After 40 scripts and countless legal and copyright problems with the Hammett Estate that ensured little of Gores' novel remained (and nothing of the Red Harvest connections), Wenders shot around 90% of the film before an unconvinced Coppola persuaded him not to shoot his planned ending until they had a rough cut of the film to see if it would really work, only for the director to realize they had film that was more about Hammett the writer than Hammett the detective. Cue yet another rewrite, while reshoots were delayed a year, by which time Forrest had gained so much weight for One From the Heart that they had to wait another year for him to slim down again while Wenders went off and shot The State of Things. Out went original co-stars Brian Keith and Ronee Blakely (by then the ex-Mrs Wenders) to be replaced by Peter Boyle and Marilu Henner, while Sylvia Miles part went out altogether, with only Frederic Forrest and Sam Fuller seemingly retained from the original cast. (Although there are claims that the bulk of the film was reshot by Coppola himself, Wenders is adamant that his American friend didn't shoot a single shot of it).

The result, Wenders felt, offered "More story, less soul." Damned with faint praise by the critics, audiences stayed away in droves when it finally saw light of projector in 1982. It's not a forgotten masterpiece and it's certainly no Chinatown, but it is a better one than it first appeared. While it's a film that felt slightly disappointing at first sight, on repeat viewings it's one of many pleasures for the film buff and more open-minded crime-writing fan. Forrest immersed himself in the role and is uncannily like the real Hammett, giving what's still his most effective performance (even briefly reprising it in the 1992 TV movie Citizen Cohn), while Wenders' visually inventive direction ensures that the film often feels more like the genuine Thirties item than a knowing pastiche.

Although Wenders' original version was shot on location, the finished version is possibly the last great backlot picture, rarely straying from the studio. Luckily it's a great backlot, with Dean Tavoularis' wonderful design that takes everything from the backstreets of Chinatown to the houses of the big rich complimented by the gloriously rich colors of Joseph Biroc's cinematography (just enough of the original shoot made it in the final cut for Philip Lathrop to get a credit for `other photography'). John Barry's score, all smoke, piano and clarinet, compliments the mood beautifully even if one major theme had already made an appearance in Body Heat. And the film is often beautifully cast: Elisha Cook Jr (The Maltese Falcon) and Sylvia Sidney (City Streets) provide the cinematic links to the real Hammett with David Patrick Kelly and Roy Kinnear mirroring Cook and Sydney Greenstreet's roles, Richard Bradford and R.G. Armstrong a variation on Barton MacLane and Ward Bond's good cop-bad cop duo and restaurateur Michael Chow a more sophisticated upmarket Peter Lorre, while the pool hall boasts Sam Fuller (who suggested the evocative writing shots from under the typewriter's keys) and Royal Dano with Hank Worden sittin' in the corner in a rockin' char, with Jack Nance for any David Lynch fans who walked into the wrong theatre by mistake..

The script rarely triumphs over the look and feel of the film, and one plot development is more Chandler than Hammett (although it does lead to a neat bit of business with a mirror), but it offers some nice quips ("First day on the job?" Hammett cracks when a rookie cop asks him to sign for a million dollar pay off, while Marilu Henner suggests"Shouldn't we call the police? Shouldn't we do something legal?" after finding herself held at gunpoint), has room for nice little moments like a weary Hammett finding children playing hide-and-seek outside his apartment and even offers a handy definition of the word `gunsel' (no, it doesn't mean hired gun). It's not a great film and probably never would have been had it had a smoother ride to the screen, but it is a much more enjoyable one than it has any right to be and it's strangely easy to like.

The various DVDs of the film worldwide are disappointingly extras-free - the Australian disc comes off best and that only offers the trailer (Paramount's Region 1 DVD doesn't even offer that). Wenders did try to find the deleted footage for a special edition DVD, but it seems to have all been destroyed years ago.