James Naremore - More Than Night - Film Noir in Its Contexts

From the beginning, Falcon was admired by intellectuals, who observed that the crime was messy, the chase circuitous, and the solution to the murder less important than the depiction of a criminal milieu. To slightly revise a question asked by Edmund Wilson (one of Hammett's supporters and America's leading critic of literary modernism), Who cares who killed Miles Archer? Spade's famous speech to Brigid at the end of the novel mocks the idea of a just solution to murder, just as the Falcon itself mocks the idea of ownership or private property. Born of a "Holy War" that, as Gutman says, "was largely a matter of loot," the Falcon is little more than an embellished form of raw capital, and it belongs to "whoever can get hold of it." The novel's final irony is that the rara avis turns out to be just as counterfeit as the characters. A phallic signifier, it provides a motive for the frantic activity of the novel; but when the paint is peeled away, all that remains is a lead shape, an empty object of exchange. Both the hermeneutic code (the enigma of the murder) and the proairetic code (the action or search for the treasure) are rendered absurd. The world, as Spade explains to Brigid in his parable about the Flitcraft case, is founded on a void.

The vaguely existential philosophy that Spade is often said to represent, and the fantasy he satisfies, is at the core of what Leslie Fiedler identifies as the "American romance": a stoic masculine individualism, living by its wits and avoiding social, economic, and sexual entanglements. This sort of romance is sometimes misogynistic and homophobic, and because of its hostility toward bourgeois marriage, it often results in latently homosexual narratives about male bonding. We find such qualities everywhere in Hammett, but what makes him slightly unusual is that he subverts the classic formulas of the romantic quest, undermining the phallic stoicism of his detectives. Spade is an unusually ruthless hero, more disturbing than any of his movie incarnations; he moves with ease through an underworld composed almost entirely of women and bohemian homosexuals, so that even his masculinity seems ambiguous; and in the end, he behaves more like a survivor in the jungle than like an agent of justice.

This nihilism and pervasive feeling of moral and sexual ambiguity becomes even more evident in Hammett's next novel, The Glass Key (1931), which Diane Johnson has described as a complex treatment of "male friendship, male loyalty, and male betrayal" (87). The plot is set in motion by a Freudian murder: a state senator kills his sonwith a walking stick, no less. Later, the senator's daughter, Janet Henry, tells the gambler-detective Ned Beaumont about one of her dreams, in which a glass key opens a door to chaos and then shatters. The dream foreshadows Ned Beaumont's discovery of a "key" to the murder and at the same time comments on the novel's many symbolic castrations. At one point, Beaumont coolly seduces a newspaper publisher's wife, driving the publisher to suicide; and in the last chapter, he takes Janet Henry away from his closest friend, political boss Paul Madvig. In the extended, sadomasochistic torture scenes of chapter 4, in which the thug Jeff keeps calling Beaumont "sweetheart," the phallic anxiety threatens to become literal: "'I got something to try.' He scooped Ned Beaumont's legs and tumbled them on the bed. He leaned over Ned Beaumont, his hands busy on Beaumont's body" (86).

The Glass Key could be described as Hammett's novel of the Dark City, his version of The Waste Land. He was reading Eliot at the time he wrote the novel, and Lillian Hellman claimed that when she first met him in 1930, they spent hours talking about the poet. He even names one of the streets in his corrupt, fictional city "upper Thames Street" (The Waste Land, line 260), and he makes Ned Beaumont a somewhat dandified figure who feels an Eliot-like cultural nostalgia: Beaumont's rooms are decorated "in the old manner, high of ceiling and wide of window," and when Janet Henry first sees them she remarks, "I didn't think there could be any of these left in a city as horribly up to date as ours has become" (141).

The indirect link with high modernism is further reinforced by a neutral, camera-eye narrative technique. Here as in all his other fiction, Hammett dispenses with both "interior" psychological views and nineteenth-century omniscience; as a result, he gives the reader no comfortable position from which to make judgments. The crooked politicians, the sadistic gangsters, the naive females, the cruelly detached gambler-protagonistall these are familiar pop-cultural stereotypes, but they are presented without any character who, like Chandler's Marlowe, acts as a spokesperson for liberal humanism. Although The Glass Key has all the adventure and suspenseful action of a melodrama, and much of the social detail of a muckraking naturalist novel, it deprives us of the usual melodramatic sermons, sentiments, or philosophical conclusions. What, finally, are we to think of Beaumont and Madvig? How are we to condemn the city without feeling like the "respectable element" whom Beaumont mocks? There is no answer to these questions, because, like nearly all of Hammett's novels, The Glass Key ultimately deals with what Stephen Marcus calls the "ethical unintelligibility of the world." Thus when Ned Beaumont reveals the identity of the villain, we do not feel that the story has been brought to a neat closure. At best, something criminal has been exposed in society's basic institutions; the villain's crime is merely a symptom of a deeper, systemic problem that seems beyond the power of individuals to solve.

Hammett's last novel, the comic The Thin Man (1934), is a partial exception to these rules. It was inspired by his relationship with Lillian Hellman and is the closest he came to a conventional, puzzle-style detective story or a romance about marriage. The setting is glamorous, the protagonist is a sophisticated amateur detective (more precisely, a retired private eye married to a Park Avenue heiress), and the mystery is solved when all the suspects are rounded up in the penultimate chapter. Even so, Nick and Nora Charles occasionally seem like members of Hemingway's lost generation:

We went into the living room for a drink. Some more people came in. Harrison Quinn left the sofa where he had been sitting with Margot Innes and said: "Now ping-pong." Asta jumped up and punched me in the belly with her front feet. I shut off the radio and poured a cocktail. The man whose name I had not caught was saying: " Comes the revolution and we'll all be lined up against the wallfirst thing." He seemed to think it was a good idea. 25

The comedy here is darkly absurd, and Nick Charles is clearly using liquor as an anesthetic. Much as he and Nora like one another, he is a potential doppelganger of Jorgenson, the gigolo who has married Mimi Wynant, and the only time he stops drinking is when he becomes interested in solving a murder. With only a slight turn of the screw, The Thin Man could have been as disturbing as any of Hammett's previous writings. The chief metaphor of the novel is cannibalism; moreover, as usual, Hammett ends on an ironic note, reminding us that nothing has fundamentally changed and casting doubt on the detective's solution. In the final chapter, Nick explains everything to Nora, who is no adoring Watson.

' 'This is just a theory, isn't it?" she asks. Nick says he is only trying to describe what is probable, and reaches for another drink. Nora complains, "It's all pretty unsatisfactory" (180).

These were Hammett's last published words as a novelist, and it may be significant that he gave them to a woman. He had already begun selling his hard-boiled thrillers to Hollywood, but his career as a scriptwriter was brief and undistinguished. Soon after achieving literary fame, he began to drink heavily, doing odd jobs at various studios and behaving as if, in the words of Nunnally Johnson, "he had no expectation of being alive much beyond Thursday" (quoted in Johnson, 124). Meanwhile, his work was altered or adjusted to suit the studios' proven formulas. In July 1930, for example, David O. Selznick wrote to B. P. Schulberg, the chief executive at Paramount, recommending that Hammett be put under contract because he had recently "created quite a stir in literary circles by his creation of two books for Knopf, The Maltese Falcon and Red Harvest. " Selznick announced that Hammett possessed "more originality than Van Dine," and might do ' 'something new and startlingly original for us"; in the same breath, however, he offered the profoundly unoriginal suggestion that Hammett ought to be put to work on a "police story'' for Paramount star George Bancroft, who had scored a great success in Josef von Sternberg's 1927 gangster movie, Underworld. 26Hammett was immediately offered a short-term contract with Paramount and was paid an extra five thousand dollars for writing a story called "After School," which became City Streets (1931). Scripted by Oliver H. P. Garrett and directed by Rouben Mamoulian, this highly sentimental melodrama was filmed in a symbolic, aestheticized, rather Sternbergian manner that clearly shows the influence of Underworld; it has brilliant visual "touches," but as Andrew Sarris remarks of the Sternberg film, its gangster protagonists (including Gary Cooper and Sylvia Sydney) have about as much connection to waking reality or to the hard-boiled tradition as the motorcyclists in Cocteau's Orphée' 2