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
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