dashiell hammett – FilmsNoir.Net

Missing Person by Patrick Modiano

“A little girl is returning from the beach, at dusk, with her mother. She is crying for no reason at all, because she would have liked to continue playing. She moves off into the distance. She has already turned the corner of the street, and do not our lives dissolve into the evening as quickly as this grief of childhood?”

– Patrick Modiano, Missing Person (2004 Prix Goncourt)

Nobel-laureate Patrick Modiano’s novel ‘Missing Person’ traces soon after Word War 2 the search by an amnesiac for his identity. He has worked for a Paris detective agency for a number of years, and after it closes down he decides to find out who he is. With a bit of detective work, he starts to find traces that begin to come together slowly by dint of accosting erstwhile strangers for answers and pursuing other connections. By the end of the book, he is almost there but a man with perhaps the last piece of the puzzle is lost at sea presumed dead. Here we have a protagonist who is the missing person he is trying to find. And he discovers only vague largely impalpable fragments of memory. He may have found an identity of sorts but he won’t recover the lost memory of a life that has “dissolved into the evening”.

Dashiell Hammett in his novel ‘The Maltese Falcon’ has Sam Spade relate a fable which in academic writing on film noir has become known as the “Flitcraft Parable”. Spade tells the story of Mr Flitcraft, a realtor and family man who one day goes out to lunch and never returns. On the day he disappeared he had narrowly escaped death when a heavy beam from a construction site fell eight stories onto the pavement, just missing him. A typically noir moment. As Spade put it: “He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works. The life he knew was a clean orderly sane responsible affair. Now a falling beam had shown him that life was fundamentally none of these things.”

Back in Paris at around the same time Georges Simenon is writing his novel ‘Monsieur Monde Vanishes’ about a well-off bourgeois, who one morning leaves his office and hops a train to Marseille, hooking up with a b-girl on the way. His wife reports him as a missing person. He gets works as a clerk in a dance joint. Neither happy nor unhappy, he exists perhaps in a way more real than in his comfortable life in Paris. But is his slumming permanent?

Monsieur Monde certainly takes all the risks and does make a shattering discovery, but like Flitcraft and the Paris amnesiac, has he found a new life or rediscovered an old one, the doppelganger in us all?

Hollywood made two attempts at adapting Dashiell Hammett’s pulp masterpiece The Maltese Falcon before John Huston scripted and directed the definitive adaptation in 1941. The stunning serendipity of the casting of Huston’s film defines the characterisations in concrete for all time. Yet it is still worth looking at the earlier movies as they each offer their own flavour and particular piquancy.

In 1931 Roy Del Ruth directed a largely faithful scenario penned by Maude Fulton and titled The Maltese Falcon, starring would-be heartthrob Ricardo Cortez as Sam Spade, and the voluptuous Bebe Daniels as Ruth Wonderly. The studio being Warner Bros. and the times pre-code, the picture has a dark gritty feel, and the sexual sparks between Spade and Wonderly are bright and thunderous. There is a coy frivolity in their antics even though in the end Bebe gets no reprieve. An early sequence starting with a scene showing a silhouette of a couple kissing in Spade’s office, which then cuts to one focused on a pair of shapely legs leaving the office, has pre-code all over it, and deftly establishes that Cortez’s Spade is definitely a lady’s man. His secretary Effie spends a lot of time on his knee while otherwise engaged in more routine office duties. The rest of the casting got the job done, and it is interesting to see Dudley Digges’ seedy portrayal of a very thin Gutman. Interesting too is seeing Bebe Daniels taking a bath, and her bare shoulders after stripping in Spade’s kitchen to prove she hadn’t palmed some of Gutman’s cash. It all gets serious by the end though.

Satan Met A Lady directed by William Dieterle in 1936 plays fast and loose with Hammett’s story, and mainly for laughs. Warren Williams as the private dick and femme-fatale Bette Davis chew up the scenery with rambunctious over-the-top portrayals. While a lot of the humour is over-played, ironically the whole affair can be seen as a cheeky satire of film noir made before Hollywood actually made one! While Williams’ exuberance is perhaps too theatrical, Davis is a delight, revelling in screwball antics that still have a whiff of pre-code insouciance. She has the best line in the movie when she is holding a gun to Williams – who throughout dons a hat which must have been borrowed from a nearby Western set – and demands “Take off your hat in the presence of a lady with a gun!” Another novelty is the Gutman character played as a matronly but mean old lady. Great fun.