Hammett

Director Wim Wenders made his American film bow with the ultra-stylish Hammett. Based on the speculative novel by Joe Gores, the story concerns real-life detective novelist Dashiell Hammett (Frederic Forest), who early in his career is involved in a complex mystery that will profoundly influence his ...more

Wim Wenders' film version of Joe Gores' novel, a conflation of elements of the writer's life with episodes from his work, is a fascinatingly stylized artifact which will likely be of more interest to the director's fans than Hammett's. More a meditation on the detective genre than an actual detective film, it bends Gores' novel to the deliberate pacing and meandering plotting of Wenders' characteristic theme of perennial wanderjahre. The casting of an actor with a persona as vulnerable as ...more