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4S Ranch Allied Gardens Alpine Baja Balboa Park Bankers Hill Barrio Logan Bay Ho Bay Park Black Mountain Ranch Blossom Valley Bonita Bonsall Borrego Springs Boulevard Campo Cardiff-by-the-Sea Carlsbad Carmel Mountain Carmel Valley Chollas View Chula Vista City College City Heights Clairemont College Area Coronado CSU San Marcos Cuyamaca College Del Cerro Del Mar Descanso Downtown San Diego Eastlake East Village El Cajon Emerald Hills Encanto Encinitas Escondido Fallbrook Fletcher Hills Golden Hill Grant Hill Grantville Grossmont College Guatay Harbor Island Hillcrest Imperial Beach Imperial Valley Jacumba Jamacha-Lomita Jamul Julian Kearny Mesa Kensington La Jolla Lakeside La Mesa Lemon Grove Leucadia Liberty Station Lincoln Acres Lincoln Park Linda Vista Little Italy Logan Heights Mesa College Midway District MiraCosta College Miramar Miramar College Mira Mesa Mission Beach Mission Hills Mission Valley Mountain View Mount Hope Mount Laguna National City Nestor Normal Heights North Park Oak Park Ocean Beach Oceanside Old Town Otay Mesa Pacific Beach Pala Palomar College Palomar Mountain Paradise Hills Pauma Valley Pine Valley Point Loma Point Loma Nazarene Potrero Poway Rainbow Ramona Rancho Bernardo Rancho Penasquitos Rancho San Diego Rancho Santa Fe Rolando San Carlos San Marcos San Onofre Santa Ysabel Santee San Ysidro Scripps Ranch SDSU Serra Mesa Shelltown Shelter Island Sherman Heights Skyline Solana Beach Sorrento Valley Southcrest South Park Southwestern College Spring Valley Stockton Talmadge Temecula Tierrasanta Tijuana UCSD University City University Heights USD Valencia Park Valley Center Vista Warner Springs

Hammett

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Wim Wenders's trickle-paced thriller is no doubt intended as a paean to Dashiell Hammett, though its orientation is much more toward the movies adapted from, or in the genre of, his work, than toward the work itself. The Forties-ish studio sets, the Venetian blinds, the shadows, and the gallery of supporting players picked for general nostalgia purposes -- Royal Dano, R.G. Armstrong, Hank Worden, Sylvia Sidney, Elisha Cook, Jr. -- are perhaps no more than to be expected. And the full opulence of the production, which all but sinks the action in every scene, is certainly to have been expected in a movie overseen by Francis Ford Coppola. Things get worse. The performances modelled unmistakably on those of Sidney Greenstreet, a much younger Elisha Cook, Jr., and Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon tend to blur the already blurred distinction between the book and the movie, reinforcing the view that to have seen the one is to have read the other. (A series of fantasy episodes plants the notion that Hammett's stories are, after all, little more than verbal boil-downs of movies playing in his head.) The particular blurring of Hammett and Bogart in Frederic Forrest's apish performance -- the crinkled brow, the head-wags, and on down to the hand-tremble after a blustering speech -- is not, however, the worst slight to Hammett, who has perhaps heretofore escaped his full share of slights. A worse one is the implied answer to the question put to him, apropos of his latest opus, by a Chinatown ganglord: "Is this pure invention or do you draw your stories from life?" The suggestion that Hammett lived his stories pretty much as written (or as baroquely illustrated here) is not just hard to swallow. It demotes Hammett from creative writer to mere stenographer. (1982) — Duncan Shepherd

Rated PG

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