Word: hammetts
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Glass Key (Paramount) is the best melodrama since The Maltese Falcon (TIME, Oct. 20, 1941), also based on a Dashiell Hammett shocker. It also clears up any lingering doubts about the status of 29-year-old Alan Ladd. He is the livest thing to turn up in this sort of scarehead since James Cagney in The Public Enemy...
...winter's entertainment bill, director John Huston has turned a routine espionage film into one of the fastest, most exciting pictures of the year. Unlike the "Falcon," "Across the Pacific" will not make movie history. Its plot and script, dashed off on a typewriter far less subtle than Dashiel Hammett's, are standardized portions of spy melodrama. The usual number of dead bodies up tortuous alleys combines with some amazingly handy Johnny-on-the-spot acts to make for a film which in other hands might have been only a better than average second feature...
...readers who like their murder in large doses: The Complete Dashiell Hammett (Knopf; $2.50), five full-length novels beginning with The Thin Man, proving pretty conclusively that the worst of Hammett is several parasangs ahead of his closest runners-up in the tough school; Three Famous Spy Novels (Random; $1.98), showing how dated E. P. Oppenheim's The Great Impersonation seems in the company of Eric Ambler's streamlined Journey into Fear and the sinister subtleties of Graham Greene's The Confidential Agent...
...Dashiell Hammett has developed a novel technique for rounding out his mystery stories. Whenever he finds himself involved in a maze of plot difficulties, he blithely adds another character, whom nobody else in the story knows anything about, and proceeds merrily...
...early Thin Man pictures suffered from Mr. Hammett's obvious failure to learn what English A students accept as gospel, but they were made enjoyable and often very amusing by some clever dialogue and by a pair of Hollywood's best wise-crackers. In the latest of the series, "The Shadow of the Thin Man," the former redeeming feature has been scrubbed away to the bone, and nothing is left but Mr. Hammett's amazingly naked dramatic structure. William Powell, as detective Nick Charles, still finds great sport in solving murders while sipping highballs' surprisingly enough, no criminal...