Word: hammett
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...situation than narrative. Nevertheless, his titles were important to him, and they are never neutral. They were, so to speak, pasted on the image like another collage element, inflecting its meaning without explaining it. They reflected his browsing in high and popular culture. The Glass Key comes from Dashiell Hammett, and references to the Fantomas thrillers (on which Magritte, along with the rest of the Surrealists and everyone else in France and Belgium, doted) are everywhere. On the other hand, The Man from the Sea is Balzac's title, and The Elective Affinities Goethe...
...mother named her Nora after Ibsen's feminist in A Doll's House, and she certainly slammed the door noisily when leaving her first two marriages. But she and her current husband Nicholas Pileggi are more like Dashiell Hammett's Nick and Nora -- for one thing, they have been making much of their living off of crime...
...final days Thompson promised his wife that he would be "famous after I'm dead about 10 years." Now he is. His reputation as a hard-boiled novelist is within spitting distance of Hammett's and Chandler's. And finally, Hollywood has discovered the man who wanted desperately to be in the movies. Three Thompson novels have recently become films: James Foley's broody After Dark, My Sweet, Maggie Greenwald's incompetent The Kill-Off and Stephen Frears' The Grifters...
Leave it to the Coen brothers -- the writer-producer-director team who were the film finds of the '80s -- to discover ferocious drama in words, character, atmosphere. Their inspiration for Miller's Crossing was a pair of Dashiell Hammett novels: Red Harvest (which provided the milieu of a corrupt city ruled by warring gangsters) and The Glass Key (which provided the plot of an aging boss and his young adviser involved with the same woman). To this blend the Coens have brought a teeming cast of sharpies, most of them spectacularly, thoughtfully venal. They speak wittily but often...