Hammett and Yeggs

As the year began I was reading all Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op stories, and so it made sense to me to finally watch CITY STREETS, the film he wrote the story for. It’s good, but it didn’t seem as dazzling as a film written by Hammett and directed by Mamoulian ought to be.

I formed a theory while I was watching it, or maybe more accurately just as it finished. Many of Hammett’s op stories play as exciting thrillers and then pull out a surprising plot twist at the end. Unlike in a whodunnit, the surprise isn’t anticipated, because Hammett carefully disguises his mystery element — we think we know exactly what’s going on. It seems like a method which could adapt readily to cinema, but CITY STREETS doesn’t do it.

I wondered if the original treatment by Hammett planted such a surprise, and I could see how it might be done. In the film, a gangster is murdered and we see Sylvia Sidney framed for it. By withholding this information and delivering it in a flashback right at the end — when Gary Cooper tells the gangsters who have been after Sidney who they ought to be blaming — the story could have pulled off a Hammett surprise.

Did Hammett write his outline that way…? Well, it turns out the outline has been published, in one of the last collections of Hammett stories, and it turns out that no, he didn’t. In fact, the flaws of the film are very apparent in the outline, and they’re very unHammettlike flaws. There’s no clear central character — it takes ages for Sylvia Sidney to even appear, Cooper is set up as a supporting character in her life, has nothing to do, her trip to prison triggers one of Mamoulian’s innovations, a striking internal monologue scene which emphasises her role as main character and POV figure for the audience, and then she becomes totally passive at the end, a damsel for Coop to suddenly rescue.

Hammett’s fiction NEVER struggles to find a central character, it’s totally obvious that the Op is the main man in the short stories and novels (Red Harvest and The Dain Curse), that Sam Spade is the central figure of The Maltese Falcon and the couple of short stories he’s in, and that Nick and Norah Charles lead the way in The Thin Man. So it’s baffling that he should have floundered here.

Outlines are wretched things, usually. I recall reading “a story written by a computer” — a ridiculously early computer, and it had been programmed with some names and possible actions. It was all like “John screws Mary. Steve fights Bill. Bill fights Mary. Jennifer screws Steve.” I’d love to get my hands on it. It was hilarious, then desperately depressing, like a Farrelly Bros movie.

Hammett’s outline isn’t as bad as that, of course, but it doesn’t read like a film, or a story, more like what Homer Simpson memorably called “Just a bunch of stuff that happened.” Hammett wasn’t wrong to think a film could centre on a couple, and that one could start off as the lead and the other could take over, though this is a far riskier stratagem. What stops this working, for me, anyway, if the fairly lengthy mob hit sequence that opens the film and which doesn’t centre on either Sydney or Coop.

The film is still an enjoyable, glossy and inventive thing — Mamoulian performs a few of his clever linking devices, such as a dissolve from a drum of beer to a slain mobster’s hat floating downriver —

A less direct link takes us from Guy Kibbee winking at Sydney to — after an intervening couple of shots and a quick fadeout — Sydney taking aim at the shooting gallery operated by Coop, in an elegant pull-back that starts with her big baby face and eyes —

Hats are almost as important in this film as in the Hammett-derived MILLER’S CROSSING. Cooper is introduced as a hat all by itself, before he turns and tilts, raising the brim like a curtain on his beautiful features —

Paramount was known as a studio that struggled with story structure, I believe. Maybe why putting Herr Lubitsch in charge of production a few years later seemed like a good idea. (It wasn’t, seemingly.)

It’s strange that Hollywood struggled with adapting Hammett, as he seems so cinematic — three attempts at THE MALTESE FALCON before they got it right, no really good direct adaptations of any of the Op stories, THE THIN MAN the one real first-time-out-the-box triumph. There’s a two-part TV movie of The Dain Curse with James Coburn which has an OK rep. I checked it out and it’s DREADFUL. A zealous screenwriter has taken it on himself to update all the cracking dialogue, deflavourizing it, while leaving the social attitudes unchanged, or in fact making things MORE racist. Avoid avoid avoid. Mamoulian’s film is at least diverting, and beautifully shot by the great Lee Garmes.