It’s Hammett Time!

Okay, I’ve had this little diatribe about Hammett stuck in the back of my head for some time now, and I’ve been holding it back, but fever and antibiotics and the tremendously regrettable running of “Song of the Thin Man” on TCM. So, sorry, here we go.

The problem with Hammett is his dreck was so tremendously drecky that you begin to doubt your belief in his good stuff. He built up some quality through the series of Continental Op stories (though, really, they’d have been forgotten were it not for his classics). His stories of a nameless tough guy detective, fashioned from his brief experiences as a Pinkerton, helped shape the hard-boiled genre — but Chandler’s lesser stuff holds up better. But building on what he’d done with “The Big Knockover,” he went on to create “Red Harvest”, a blood-filled shooting fest set against a dark background. Then, “The Maltese Falcon,” which was made into a movie twice before they got it right on the third try by shooting the book as the script. A classic on the page and on film, it launched the career of the detective Sam Spade, though what was done with it on radio was diluted from one of Bogart’s best performances. Then “The Dain Curse” and “The Glass Key,” both okay but not terrifically memorable, and both fairly hard to follow. Veronica Lake did a star turn in the movie of “The Glass Key,” but the movie wasn’t any more understandable. Then he did “The Thin Man,” a light-hearted romp in some ways but slightly disturbing in others. The Thin Man was NOT the detective, Nick Charles, but the victim in the book, so thin he was a skeleton. But they made it a movie the same year, and suddenly William Powell was The Thin Man, and off Hammett went to Hollywood. He never produced another book of note, as he drank like a fish, encouraged Lillian Hellman in her career, and produced a pile of lousy screenplays and radio scripts.

In there somewhere was an attempt at a Hearst comic strip, “Secret Agent X-9,” a teaming with illustrator Alex Raymond that should have been fantastic but which was hastily dashed-off pastiches of his previous characters and stories. Some of the individual lines are fun, but the stories are preposterous. Eventually Hammett was axed and Raymond went on to write it himself. I dug up an old copy of this a couple of weeks ago and was stunned at how weak it was. But now, TCM is showing a 1947 film he “wrote,” though who knows how much it had to be doctored at the time to even be filmed, “Song of The Thin Man.” 13 years after playing a dashing drunken couple in their 40s partying their way through Nora Charles’s inheritance, they’re back again, with an annoying child detective (see jumping the shark), and a dog of inexplicable longevity. Priceless lines? Well, there aren’t any. It’s cut and pasted from the leavings of some Bowery Boys pictures.

You see stuff like this and wonder, is it possible that The Maltese Falcon was really that good? I guess the gin’ll do that to a man….

It’s just gotta be time for my medicine…..