Hammett (1982)
Directed by Wim Wenders
Chinatown, San Francisco, 1928. Former private detective Dashiell Hammett, a compulsive drinker with tuberculosis who writes pulp fiction for a living, receives an unexpected visit from an old friend asking for help.
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What critics compared Hammett to
Wim Wenders ("Hammett"/"The State of Things"/"Alice In The Cities") directs and Sam Shepard writes the script (it was also adapted by L.M. Kit Carson) for this overly ambitious but at times compelling contemporary Western that debunks the John Ford "Old West" myth in The Searchers, or at least brings to it a more updated perception.
Winner of the Palme D’Or at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival, Paris, Texas (Criterion) was not Wim Wenders’ first American film—that would be Hammett (1982), which proved to be a dispiriting experience when producer Francis Ford Coppola decided to step in and re-edit Wenders’ vision to something more commercial (so much for the creative freedom he promised filmmakers)—but it is the first American film where Wenders carved his own vision into the American landscape (both physical and cinematic).
Given half a chance, he could have done the same with “Hammett” (1982), which cost him four years of his creative energies and left little behind except bitter memories.
Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival, Paris, Texas (1984) was not Wim Wenders’ first American film—that would be Hammett (1982), which proved to be a dispiriting experience when producer Francis Ford Coppola decided to step in and re-edit Wenders’ vision to something more commercial (so much for the creative freedom he promised filmmakers)—but it is the first American film where Wenders carved his own vision into the American landscape (both physical and cinematic).
The film was viewed as a comeback for Wenders, whose reputation as one of the superstars of the New German Cinema along with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Volker Schlöndorff, Margarethe von Trotta and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, had been bruised by the lukewarm reception to Hammett (1982), his troubled collaboration with Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios and the marginal distribution of such meditations on the crisis of the auteur as Der Stand der Dinge ( The State of Things , 1982) and Chambre 666 (1982).
This is Wenders's fourth film shot at least partly in America (the others were "Alice in the Cities," " The American Friend ," and "Hammett").