Word: hammett
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...Maltese Falcon (Warner) is frighteningly good evidence that the British (Alfred Hitchcock, Carol Reed, et al.) have no monopoly on the technique of making mystery films. A remake of Dashiell Hammett's hard-boiled mystery, it is rich raw beef right off the U.S. range...
...passel of furtive folk vigorously committing homicide to get hold of a bejeweled statuette of a falcon may sound old-hat to present-day cinemagoers, but Director John Huston makes their melodramatic activities as immediate as a shot in a dark room. His characters keep close to Hammett's originals, who in turn are so close to real life that what is constantly about to happen to them (and often does) becomes at times downright unbearable...
...Author Hammett, 47, onetime Pinkerton detective, white-haired, and very thin, has not written a book since his memorable The Thin Man (1934). Since then, the once undisputed champion of U.S. crime-story writers has been scripting his thrillers for Hollywood. For a long, long time he has had his sixth book-now titled There Was a Young Man-under way. He swears it is almost finished. Queried about his whereabouts (now Manhattan), one of the author's waggish friends quipped: "He's sitting at the Beverly-Wilshire contemplating his novel...
...Communists could count among their allies such names as Granville Hicks, Newton Arvin, Waldo Frank, Lewis Mumford, Matthew Josephson, Kyle Crichton (Robert Forsythe), Malcolm Cowley, Donald Ogden Stewart, Erskine Caldwell, Dorothy Parker, Archibald MacLeish, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, John Steinbeck, George Soule, many another...
Many a 20th-century writer has shown the influence of the movies. Two who have thus added to the vitality of contemporary writing are Malraux and Dashiell Hammett; Paul Vialar is a third. Jerome himself so inescapably suggests Cinemactor Jean Cabin that the latter must have inspired him. Rose of the Sea is rather a printed movie than a novel, and with a few passages cut would be expert and beautiful...