Word: hammetts
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...past year has not been kind to Coppola and Zoetrope. Three movies the studio was to have released in 1981-not only One From the Heart but also Hammett, German Director Wim Wenders' moody detective drama, and Escape Artist, Caleb Deschanel's saga of a runaway boy-have yet to be seen. The Chase Manhattan Bank, which had lent millions to Coppola, cut off the funding. Staff salaries were met with the help of Paramount Pictures, which bought one of Zoetrope's scripts and offered Coppola a low-interest loan. Paramount also secured the distribution rights...
...reveals a Perelman considerably less impulsive and a bit more socially adept than his fictional alter ego. Beyond this however, The Hindsight Saga offers little. Perelman relates his experiences with a number of the celebrities of the day, but, with the exception of a terrific anecdote about Dashiell Hammett, these are lackluster. Most of the characters don't even have the fresh madness of Perelman's fictional figures...
...sometimes cloys: "He really wasn't so much a fool as he was giddy about still being alive." Lengthy erotic descriptions tend to become postcoital arias. But Har rison scores well on the firing range: his humor usually strikes in the killing zone. Dashiell Hammett's low-rent realism made the mystery novel fun to read. War lock demonstrates that it is equally enjoy able to spoof...
...Hammett: Was that a question...
...Shadow Man. Layman's book is the best of its kind around today, and even without the help of Lillian Hellman, he has pieced together the life in a readable, if somewhat stodgy account. It's workmanlike biography of an unworkmanlike man, with none of the flair that marked Hammett's writing and none of the hard sensibilities he made so popular. In some respects, it's not nearly as interesting as Hammett's fiction, since Hammett's Ops have more to say about the state of things in the urban steamvat than any academic ever will. Still...