Word: hammett
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Director Frank Tuttle uses Dashiell Hammett's trick of understatement, builds his picture to unbearable suspense in the scene in which Beaumont, battered, bleeding, crawls from the bed on which Shad O'Rory's henchmen have thrown him, starts a fire in the mattress, tumbles 20 feet out a window, drags himself to safety...
Detective Scaffa, son of a Sicilian contractor, looks and acts as if he might have been invented by Dashiell Hammett. He is tall and dark, sleek, sad-eyed, softspoken, close-mouthed and elusive. The public has heard that he lives quietly with his mother in The Bronx, takes no interest in women, has never read a detective story in his life. No one except Scaffa knows just how much stolen property he has retrieved. He puts the figure...
...SMILING CORPSE-Anonymous- Farrar & Rinehart ($2). The murder of a critic at a big literary tea gives Chesterton, Van Dine, Rohmer, Hammett and others a chance to show off. First-rate satirical farce even for those not up on the mannerisms of current bestsellers...
...knows a lot about animals, rides like a centaur, drives like a state policeman. He did his bit in the War ("We had slept with our windows open that hard winter and had had only one blanket apiece"). And he is almost as hard a drinker as a Dashiell Hammett hero. It is small wonder that Julie falls in love with him at sight. Conscious of the fact that she is "not a lady," that she has a far-off husband with whom she does not get along, a precarious job as a style-illustrator, she begins writing him love...
Invitation to a Murder (by Rufus King; Ben Stein, producer). Never a Dashiell Hammett when he was writing his murder tales. Playwright King's dialog is bookish, lifeless, unconvincing. But he has a knack of conveying a sense of horror ; in one Invitation to a Murder scene a rich and powerful California lady lies in a deathlike trance, shrouded, while the grisly organ music of her funeral fills her mansion. Lorinda Channing (Gale Sondergaard) feigns death with the aid of a struggling physician (Walter Abel) to trap a relative who has been trying to poison her. Returning from...