Dashiell Hammett and the Movies

William H. Mooney

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780813573045
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

As the father of the hardboiled detective genre, Dashiell Hammett had a huge influence on Hollywood. Yet, it is easy to forget how adaptable Hammett’s work was, fitting into a variety of genres and inspiring generations of filmmakers.
Dashiell Hammett and the Movies offers the first comprehensive look at Hammett’s broad oeuvre and how it was adapted into films from the 1930s all the way into the 1990s. Film scholar William H. Mooney reveals the wide range of films crafted from the same Hammett novels, as when The Maltese Falcon was filmed first as a pre-Code sexploitation movie, then as a Bette Davis screwball comedy, and finally as the Humphrey Bogart classic. He also considers how Hammett rose to Hollywood fame not through the genre most associated with him, but through a much fizzier concoction, the witty murder mystery The Thin Man. To demonstrate the hold Hammett still has over contemporary filmmakers, the book culminates in an examination of the Coen brothers’ pastiche Miller’s Crossing. 
Mooney not only provides us with an in-depth analysis of Hammett adaptations, he also chronicles how Hollywood enabled the author’s own rise to stardom, complete with a celebrity romance and a carefully crafted public persona. Giving us a behind-the-scenes look at the complex power relationships, cultural contexts, and production concerns involved in bringing Hammett’s work from the page to the screen, Dashiell Hammett and the Movies offers a fresh take on a literary titan. 

1

Three Early Films

Roadhouse Nights (1930), City Streets (1931), and Mister Dynamite (1935)

Dashiell Hammett’s introduction to Hollywood came during his most productive period as a writer. He submitted Poisonville to Alfred A. Knopf in February 1928,1 and it was published as Red Harvest a year later. In the meantime, between August and November 1928, Hammett was exchanging ideas about revisions of The Dain Curse with Knopf editor Harry C. Block.2 By then The Maltese Falcon had already been submitted in June, so that Block left it to Hammett to decide which book would be published first.3 The Dain Curse came out in June 1929 and The Maltese Falcon in February 1930, the same month that Hammett completed his next novel, The Glass Key.4

As his literary reputation blossomed, Hammett quickly came to understand the potential for movie earnings. He was still an unknown when Red Harvest was picked up by Paramount for a modest amount in September 1929,5 but by the following June, Warner Bros. agreed with Knopf to pay $8,500 for rights to The Maltese Falcon, Hammett getting 80 percent.6 By July 1930, David O. Selznick was advocating that Paramount hire him for $300 a week, with a $5,000 bonus for the story that became City Streets (1931).7 In January of 1931, Darryl Zanuck at Warner Bros. offered him $5,000 to sign another contract, which specified $5,000 more for a treatment, and an additional $5,000 if the story was accepted for production.8 Hammett received the first $10,000, but “On the Make” was rejected by Warner Bros. in April 1931; only later, after the success of The Thin Man, was this story resold to Universal and made as Mister Dynamite. In April 1932, when The Glass Key was published in the United States, the movie rights were sold to Paramount for $25,000.

It was the violence of Red Harvest that attracted Hollywood, its gangsters rather than the mystery story or detection, for gangsters were everywhere at the time. As Will Hays, president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA), would write, “The gangster cult had been a main theme of journalism for a decade.”9 Along with the acquisition of Red Harvest, Paramount studio head B. P. Schulberg, with Gary Cooper under contract, wanted Hammett to write “a gangster film for Coop.”10 But Hammett’s literary reputation soon altered Hollywood’s perception of him. By January 1931, after the publishing success of The Maltese Falcon, executives at Warner Bros. wanted Hammett to create, in Richard Layman’s words, “an original Sam Spade story for a movie starring William Powell.”11

Roadhouse Nights, City Streets, and Mister Dynamite—along with the 1931 version of The Maltese Falcon and Woman in the Dark (1934)—represent Hammett’s transition from an unknown author to a successful novelist employed by the studios. Yet until the success of The Thin Man, he was still treated as a hack, a supplier of raw material for an industry turning out some four hundred movies each year. Thus Roadhouse Nights would be shaped primarily by another writer, Ben Hecht. City Streets would be organized around its star, the film’s specific form dictated by an imposing director, Rouben Mamoulian. Mister Dynamite, following The Thin Man’s success for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, became a comedy for Edmund Lowe and Jean Dixon at a much weaker studio, Universal. In all three of these cases, Hammett’s work was little more than a point of departure.

Roadhouse Nights (1930)

Red Harvest was a first novel by a little-known author—its initial printing of three thousand copies took a full year to sell. So the studio had no compunction in giving Ben Hecht, who had written the extremely successful film Underworld (Josef von Sternberg, 1927), freedom to reinvent Hammett’s novel. He did so almost completely—Hecht’s background in journalism and the box office record of Underworld largely explain the transformation of Red Harvest into Roadhouse Nights. In Hecht’s detailed treatment for Roadhouse Nights, William Nolan has written, “nothing of Hammett’s novel remained.”12 This is only a slight exaggeration.

The film was Walter Wanger’s second credited production, and it relied on much of the same crew as his first, The Lady Lies (1929): both films were directed by Hobart Henley, with William O. Steiner as cinematographer and Helene Turner as editor, and both featured Charles Ruggles. But Hecht made the story his own. He had begun as a newspaper reporter and active participant in Chicago’s literary scene prior to World War I. After some success as a playwright in New York, he was famously summoned to Hollywood by a telegram from his friend Herman J. Mankiewicz, who had left the drama desk at the New York Times to write scripts: “There are millions to be grabbed out here,” Mankiewicz wrote, “and your only competition is idiots.”13 With Charles MacArthur, Hecht had written the 1928 Broadway hit The Front Page, which became a film under the same title in 1931 and would also be the basis of His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940). And Underworld, his first credited screen story, won Hecht the Oscar for Best Original Story at the inaugural Academy Awards ceremony on May 16, 1929. Both The Front Page and Underworld derived from his experience as a reporter during the period of rising gangland crime in Prohibition-era Chicago. Underworld’s box office success is frequently credited with spurring the cycle of gangster films that concluded with Hecht’s Scarface (Hawks, 1932). The Front Page (Lewis Milestone, 1931) holds a similar place with respect to newspaper films. If the success of Underworld made Hecht an obvious choice to adapt the Prohibition gangster novel Red Harvest, Hecht must equally have found it obvious to replace Hammett’s private detective with a newspaperman: his experience in that profession was even more extensive than Hammett’s as a Pinkerton operative.

Remaining from Hammett’s novel are bootleggers attempting to take over a town, a murdered newspaperman, an investigator making trouble for the gangsters, and the character of Lola Fagan, who retains something of Hammett’s Dinah Brand in Red Harvest, with her corruption and instinctive goodness as two sides of the coin of human nature. Yet the film’s locale has nothing to do with the Montana mining town in Red Harvest, nor with the strikebreaking history of the Pinkerton agency that Hammett knew firsthand. The single gang of bootleggers in the film represents only one of many factions in the novel, that of Pete the Finn. Left out are those led by Reno Starkey, Lew Yard, “Whisper” Thaler, and Elihu Willsson, not to mention Dinah Brand’s additional conquests—a bank clerk named Albury and the IWW union organizer Quint. In Roadhouse Nights, the murdered newspaperman is a reporter rather than a publisher, and his investigating colleague is a clever, cynical drunk rather than a professional detective.

Unlike the film, the novel is full of action scenes, including gangland shootouts, chases, a knife thrown into the neck of a boxer in the ring who had failed to take a dive, and one-on-one encounters between the Op and various attackers. But the most important aspect of the book passed over by Hecht is the Op’s struggle to avoid going “blood simple”: becoming so involved in killing as a solution to Poisonville’s problems that he will lose his professionalism and commitment to the values of the Continental Detective Agency as embodied by the Old Man, the head of the agency and a paragon of objectivity. In the novel, the Op’s struggle is that of every individual against the corruption of life in industrial society, a corruption exemplified by the bootlegging of the Prohibition era.

Rather than following the plot of Red Harvest, Hecht’s story reworks that of Underworld, once again creating a love triangle between a gangster, his girl, and a passive, somewhat intellectual drunk. In both films, the ineffectual male is goaded into action out of love for a woman and a sense of loyalty. A difference between the two stories is that in Underworld, a gangster named Buck Mulligan (Fred Kohler), entirely violent and self-interested, is set up as the foil of a heroic gangster, Bull Weed (George Bancroft). But further continuity with Underworld is evident in the casting of Fred Kohler as Sam Horner, a figure who, like Mulligan, is without redeeming qualities. In Roadhouse Nights, Willie Bindbugel (Charles Ruggles) is a reporter sent to find his missing colleague who was murdered by Horner. On the scene he encounters Horner’s moll, a singer named Lola Fagan (Helen Morgan), whom he recognizes as Lola Davies from his hometown, the “first girl I ever kissed.” Their love reignited, Bindbugel and Davies attempt to escape, but they are surprised by Horner en route to the train station. Ultimately, with the help of an entertainer named Daffy (Jimmy Durante), they turn the tables on the gang—Lola rescues Bindbugel by shooting Horner, and the other gangsters are arrested.

The film also attempts to exploit the star image of Helen Morgan, capitalizing on her reputation as a torch singer and on audience memories of her success in Applause (Rouben Mamoulian, 1929) as Kitty Darling, a burlesque queen who does all she can to keep her daughter from discovering how low she has fallen. Applause—from an early script by Garrett Fort, who also wrote the “continuity” from Hecht’s story for Roadhouse Nights—followed Morgan’s 1927 Broadway success as the mixed-race Julie in Show Boat, and her reprise of Julie’s “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” that was used as a prologue in the film version of the same (1929). Julie is an entertainer who suffers a fate not unlike that of Kitty in Applause, though Julie is rejected because of race, while Kitty is cast aside when age undermines her appeal as a burlesque performer. As Lola in Roadhouse Nights, Morgan is once more playing an entertainer whose life is on the brink of a fatal turn, as a dominating crime boss threatens to overwhelm the essential goodness of her character. Her doomed love in Show Boat and her sacrifice for her daughter in Applause prefigure the backstory of Roadhouse Nights, in which Horner had degraded Lola for ten years before she recovers her true identity through a rekindled girlhood infatuation for Bindbugel. In other words, the audience for Roadhouse Nights got to witness the rescue of Helen Morgan not only from Horner, but also from the fate she suffers in Show Boat and Applause.

Casting Ruggles as Bindbugel shaded Roadhouse Nights toward comedy. Already one can see, at this early stage in his career, the ingredients that would mark Ruggles’s later screen persona, for example as Adolph in Ernst Lubitsch’s One Hour with You (1932), a man unable to comprehend the woman he pursues even as he collects evidence on the wife he plans to divorce. Or as Major Horace Applegate in Bringing Up Baby (1938), a big game hunter who, in true screwball form, can’t tell a loon’s call from the roar of a leopard. Bindbugel is presented as an articulate half-wit who has given himself over to gambling and drink, and who only develops a sense of purpose when he finds the body of his former colleague washed up on a beach. Like most of Ruggles’s characters, Bindbugel must work hard to understand the world that others inhabit naturally and from which he finds himself at a distance. In his stylized movements and in his voice that he modulates with everything he says, Ruggles portrays Bindbugel as a man for whom life is a game of adopting postures, of well-intentioned attempts to fit in. The performance bridges Kohler’s gangster seriousness in the role of Horner and the roadhouse entertainers’ world of song and make-believe.

The performers at the roadhouse also introduce the familiar trope of backstage musicals in which entertainers rescue life from banality; the show people are endowed with a talent for creating illusions that foster hope and aspiration. Morgan’s singing laments life’s difficulties, while Jimmy Durante brings a magical power into the world of the film. Durante, with Lou Clayton and Eddie Jackson, had been a vaudeville star since the mid-1920s. In the film he acts as Lola’s agent, a Puckish figure in the employ of this Titania in contrast to the tyrannical Oberon of Horner. Through his timely interventions, the film becomes a fairytale of love triumphing over corruption, allowing the jaded torch singer and the cynical journalist to slough off the years and reenter a presexual childhood paradise.

Roadhouse Nights is routinely disparaged as badly representing an important first novel, but comparing the film to Red Harvest provides the wrong measure of value. Indeed, the film lacks the power of Red Harvest. Yet in spite of the technical limitations of its production in 1929, it has its own integrity, a product in some degree of what André Bazin famously called “the genius of the system.”

City Streets (1931)

City Streets was based on a mere seven-page, handwritten outline by Hammett, but in this case the story was used as the basis of the film rather than ignored. After The Maltese Falcon was published in February 1930 and embraced by reviewers, Hammett became a sought-after prospect. By the following July, David O. Selznick would write to B. P. Schulberg, “We have the opportunity to secure Dashiell Hammett to do one story for us. . . . Hammett has recently created quite a stir in literary circles by his creation of two books for Knopf, The Maltese Falcon and Red Harvest. I believe that he is another Van Dine—indeed that he possesses more originality than Van Dine, and might very well prove to be the creator of something new and startlingly o...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Inferior Hammett or Exemplary Hollywood?
• Chapter 1. Three Early Films: Roadhouse Nights (1930), City Streets (1931), and Mister Dynamite (1935)
• Chapter 2. Celebrity: The Thin Man (1934)
• Chapter 3. After The Thin Man: From Sequel to Series
• Chapter 4. Lillian Hellman: Woman in the Dark (1934) and Watch on the Rhine (1943)
• Chapter 5. Sexual Politics: The Maltese Falcon (1931), Satan Met a Lady (1936), and The Maltese Falcon (1941)
• Chapter 6. Ethnic Politics: The Glass Key (1935 and 1942)
• Chapter 7. Hammett in Retrospect: Miller’s Crossing (1990)
• Conclusion: Dashiell Hammett and the Movies
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author