Comments on: When a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it

By: Harry Jones

Harry Jones — Tue, 02 Apr 2019 15:02:21 +0000

Brigid’s game is to appeal to a man’s protective instinct at least as much as the sex urge. She’s looking for a sucker with white knight fantasies. It’s the quavering voice and the pathetic begging that sells it.

A lot of those old movies are sly about the censorship. They don’t depict, but sometimes they hint so strongly you can’t possibly miss it. Lorre as Cairo fellating his cane…

On the other hand, the pornography angle in The Big Sleep is almost completely lost in the film adaptation. You see it mostly by the hole it leaves – various things that don’t make sense otherwise, that the scriptwriters (Faulkner?) didn’t bother to paper over properly.

By: Bob Sykes

Bob Sykes — Tue, 02 Apr 2019 11:21:02 +0000

My favorite film. But Mary Astor is badly cast as a sexpot.

By: Bruce

Bruce — Tue, 02 Apr 2019 04:52:50 +0000

According to Hammett ‘gunsel’ wasn’t ambiguous, it refers precisely to a hair-trigger young gay killer who is half batty. But who knows, Hammet might have been fooling.

By: Neovictorian

Neovictorian — Mon, 01 Apr 2019 23:46:52 +0000

The action scenes in Sanity were very much influenced by Hammett's Red Harvest, the one set in Montana. And Philip Marlowe was a big piece of my hero Cal Adler, as well.

By: L. C. Rees

L. C. Rees — Mon, 01 Apr 2019 23:41:05 +0000

Much of Hammett's work is worth reading. As I recall, Hammett's work dealing with a never named character called "the Continental Op" was more Sam Spade than The Maltese Falcon. One of the novels featuring the Continental Op was set in a thinly disguised Butte, Montana at a time in the early 20C when that mining town had a significant gangster problem. This struck me as amusing since Butte was merely a spot on the map my brothers and I would read and laugh as we drove past. The entire Continental Op corpus is worth reading. Never got around to The Thin Man, though I've heard good things about it. Hammett's entire body of work is easy to get through though. After he began a long relationship with the commie succubus Lillian Hellman, her work suddenly gained a quality it had lacked before. Hammett's suddenly precipitously fell off. Rule of thumb: commie succubi are bad for building up a sizable literary catalog. Raymond Chandler's work is also worth reading. I found him consistently funnier than Hammett. Chandler, incidentally, wrote The Simple Art of Murder, a useful critical essay on detective fiction, including some coverage of Hammett.