Hammett (1982) – DVD

**/**** Image A- Sound A-
starring Frederic Forrest, Peter Boyle, Marilu Henner, Roy Kinnear
screenplay by Ross Thomas and Dennis O'Flaherty, based on the novel by Joe Gores
directed by Wim Wenders

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Wim Wenders nominally directed Hammett, and its famous recutting by the studio depressed him to the point of taking revenge with a lovely film called The State of Things. (Hammett sat in limbo for so long that the two actually came out at the same time.) Indeed, you'd be hard-pressed to connect this overdesigned, hermetically-sealed, zestily cynical movie with the director's gently disappointed, free-ranging, existing-location-dependent masterpieces. More accurately, Hammett is a Francis Ford Coppola film, a Zoetrope film, and a landmark in the failure of '80s cinephilia. It does for Dashiell Hammett what Raiders of the Lost Ark did for Flash Gordon, which is to say it reproduces surfaces without a shred of critical distance or analytical incisiveness. It's a non-stop reference orgy that loves the idiotic conventions it ought to be deconstructing–Chinatown, as seen through the prism of Sin City: a series of hyper-real, hard-boiled requirements to be fulfilled rather than a summing up of what they represent.

I imagine the real Dashiell Hammett would be a tad disturbed at the what-me-worry punching bag he's become. As rendered by Frederic Forrest, he's an empty shell of hard-bitten noir cynicism–a man so unfazed by the corruption seething around him that he almost expects it to happen. Of course, it could be argued that this is the point of hard-boiled fiction and film noir, but the loss of innocence (and attachment to the values it defends) isn't there: it's all a hipster pose, an excuse to wear a costume and arch an eyebrow. Forrest's Hammett isn't terribly perturbed when old employer Jimmy Ryan (Peter Boyle) leads him into a missing-persons case, and though the ensuing hunt for Chinese prostitute Crystal Ling (Lydia Lei) allegedly arouses his moral sense, it really just puts him in autopilot to engage in a conspiracy plot left over from the revisionist '70s.

The movie wants to be a Watergate-era muckraker: it's got a San Francisco riddled with monsters and powerful bullies, an insistence on the sex and violence classical Hollywood was forced to omit, and a motion towards social reality in Chinatown through which Hammett pursues friend and foe. But once it reaches these revisionist destinations, Hammett marches straight back to the ugly starting points. The Chinatown underworld is a series of Yellow Peril stereotypes that only updates the racism of the 1940s, while the various historical signposts, such as ex-Wobblie cabbie Eli (Elisha Cook, Jr.), are largely aged stereotypes with leftie referents tacked on. And the massive conspiracy involving industry and government (and centring on prostitution and pornography) is more pruriently than progressively conceived.

Hammett is ultimately a snapshot of Coppola and the movie brats once the American Renaissance had begun to tarnish. By 1982, the tentative critical approach of Scorsese/Altman/Penn/Schrader/Peckinpah/Godfather Francis had been supplanted by the unlimited fetishism of Hill/Carpenter/Landis/Dante/One from the Heart Francis. Whatever the limitations of the former, they had suggested the possibility of resistance; whatever the latent virtues of the latter, their mission statement was to scatter the issue from your head. Zoetrope, an institution built entirely to seal the director inside a bubble, led the march of the empty signifiers. To lock Wenders–a man whose career was built on the defamiliarizing of existing locations and the melancholy of the open road–into this matrix is to court madness. Not only does it stuff a square peg into a round hole, it also takes the idea that an artist engages with the larger world and replaces it with a tin-pot dictator. The real corruption of Hammett is the one that uses an honest fictional response to the early 20^th century to blot out the realities of the late 20^th century.

In the same way that Walter Hill chucked Sol Yurick's urban nightmare to punch up The Warriors, Wenders/Coppola make the evil of industry and government into a party game. Once the mystery of who nicked Crystal Ling is solved, Hammett wraps up with a supremely condescending speech to the culprit, who, though a miserable, vulnerable person merely trying to survive, is treated like one more villain. Naturally, the downer ending is greeted by Hammett's neighbour/helper Kit Conger (Marilu Henner) noting, "That sure didn't end like one of your stories"–but the feeble attempt at upending expectations is greeted with Hammett basically shrugging, rewriting a lost manuscript in what seems like an hour, and ending the movie. The idea that that was enough–for Coppola, for a generation of filmmakers, for a decade of American film culture–doesn't reflect well on those of us who praise their vapid achievements.

THE DVD
Fittingly, Paramount dishes out a transfer that highlights the one virtue of technical proficiency. The 1.78:1, 16×9-enhanced image is not too shabby in dealing with Hammett's deeply saturated colours, and the slightly soft detail is pleasingly film-like. (It's just crisp enough to appreciate the meticulous production design, making you wish you were looking at a real movie.) The Dolby 2.0 audio is equally remarkable, its surprisingly stereophonic soundstage and razor-sharp elements inviting speculation as to what would have happened had they sprung for a 5.1 remix. No extras, of course: a Wenders commentary would have scandalized too many people, Coppola most of all. Curiously, however, the menus are fully-animated.

97 minutes; PG; 1.78:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 2.0 (Stereo); CC; English subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Paramount