The Glass Key (1942)
Directed by Stuart Heisler
A crooked politician finds himself being accused of murder by a gangster from whom he refused help during a re-election campaign.
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What critics compared The Glass Key to
Like many of Hammett's criminal masterminds -- Paul Madvig in The Glass Key, Kaspar Gutman in The Maltese Falcon -- the Pin is isolated by his power, and he seems to admire Brendan for his shrewdness and self-possession.
If the great mystery writer Dashiell Hammett ("The Maltese Falcon," "The Glass Key") had written about teenagers, it might have turned out to be quite a bit like "Brick," a moody puzzler written and directed by Hammett admirer Rian Johnson.
Working with breathtaking flair, director Joel Coen (his brother, Ethan, produces, and the two collaborate on scripts) has captured and heightened the labyrinthine plot twists, the poetically tough dialogue, the fatalism and stark pop beauty that made movies such as The Big Sleep and books like Hammett's The Glass Key such compulsive, whirlpool entertainments.
Miller’s Crossing dreams a beaut, no less so for the fact that Joel and Ethan Coen’s film is a reverent, rigorous reimagining of the world of Dashiell Hammett, especially as limned in The Glass Key and Red Harvest.
The Glass Key and Miller's Crossing represent two distinctive interpretations of Hammett's literature.
Yes, the Coens have engaged in remakes before (“The Ladykillers,” and, arguably, “Miller’s Crossing,” a version of Dashiell Hammett’s “The Glass Key”), and they’ve made a number of noirish films that feel like they could have been dressed as westerns without much alteration (including “Blood Simple,” “Raising Arizona,” “Fargo” and “No Country for Old Men”).
Miller's Crossing was a sly, unacknowledged blend of two Dashiell Hammett's tales, Red Harvest and The Glass Key; and O Brother Where Art Thou? transferred The Odyssey to the American south in the 1930s.