I thought I had hit the jackpot when I learned that Hammet had finally been released on DVD. Yes, the movie was obscure, but it had one major advantage to it- was ghost directed by the greatest filmmaker of all time, Francis Ford Coppola. Visions of yet another Coppola masterpiece shot through my head- I thought I had seen them all. So I was practically drooling when the movie started, and the great Zoetrope Studios logo came on the screen. And then I saw the movie for what it was- a great director rushing through a project, so he could try to be a great producer as well.
A bit of background information- Hammet was one of the first films that Coppola attempted to produce while he was at his second shot at starting his own studio, Zoetrope productions. Conceived as a haven for artists away from Hollywood, it seemed the natural place for an obvious "art" director like Wim Wenders to make his American debut.
But then two crisis struck- the first was that Wenders apparently went nuts, going massively over budget and filming at a snail's pace. The other crisis was Coppola's own- his pet project, the musical One From the Heart, had also gone hugely over budget as well, been released to scathing reviews and flopped at the box office. Coppola had financed much of the film with his own money, and he was already in debt from Apocalypse Now. Although another Zoetrope project, Carroll Ballard's The Black Stallion, was a critical and commercial success, it wasn't enough. It became necessary to fire Wenders and try to finish the film for him. Apparently, Coppola was very dissatisfied with what ever the German had done, as he also reshot many scenes. One source states that about 70% of Hammet is Coppola's work, and that number goes up when you consider he always did all of the post-production.
But the problem with the finish product is simple- it's clear Coppola didn't give damn about the material. The movie is fictionalized adventure of novelist Dashiel Hammet (Frederick Forest), who wrote The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man. The complex noir plot involves Hammet's PI friend Jimmy Ryan (Peter Boyle) calling upon his pal to payback a favor owed to him and investigate he's stuck on (Hammet was a Pinkerton detective in real life). The film is essentially one long series of noir pastiches in which Hammet tries to find clues to his immensely complex (which I didn't really follow) which begin to relate a little too closely to the novel he's working on.
Although the film could clearly be called Coppola-esq., with dynamic visuals and a clever play on genre conventions, it just seems like FFC never really had his heart in the project and was rushing through it, which is probably what happened. I get the sense that the director never particularly cared for noir (which is why he took his gangster films The Godfather and The Cotton Club in far different direction that most would have), the project never seems to reach its launching point. Although the visuals are eye-popping (the man is incapable of making a bad-looking movie), there is a sort of fake look and artificiality to them seems inappropriate, vaguely reminiscent of Guy Maddin. This may have been intentional by Wenders or Coppola, or both, as fact and fiction collide, but it doesn't really work and I never believed the world of the movie as I had in so many other Coppola films. The only real highlight of Hammet for me was the surprise supporting performance of sitcom star Marilu Henner as one of the femme fatales- she was a counter intuitive choice, probably only chosen because she Forrest's spouse, but her oddly nice and optimistic fatale practically jumps of the screen. If the rest of the movie had enough energy as her performance, this would be really something, as it is now, it's merely a footnote, a very minor work in a great director's career.
Hammett (1982)