Recasting Nick Charles

Last week Thompson on Hollywood ran a non-story on Johnny Depp’s planned Thin Man remake. You might remember that I blogged about the potential for such a project last year. The only bit of new information that’s emerged since then isn’t exactly encouraging. It’s a given that the screenplay for this film needs to be urbane and sophisticated, right? The first three Thin Man movies were written by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, after all.

Well, Johnny Depp and Rob Marshall have entrusted the project to… Jerry Stahl.

Author of Bad Boys II.

Oh dear.

The more I think about this, the more this film seems doomed. Wrong scriptwriter, wrong director and worst of all, wrong leading man. I’ll admit it, I’ve never been a Johnny Depp fan. For me, he’s one of those actors who’s all surface, rarely letting us in – always playing funny rather than being funny.

In my opinion, there’s only one actor working at the moment who might be able to match William Powell:

John Slattery

Think about it. He looks good in a suit, he drinks and smokes gracefully, he’s just the right age and he’s a ringer for Dashiell Hammett. Put a ‘tache on him and you’re in business.

Of course, the real sign that Depp and Marshall’s remake is in trouble is the lack of any credible Nora. Film stars just don’t look like Myrna Loy any more, and they rarely have the same knack for comedy. Can anyone think of  “a lanky brunette with a wicked jaw” who might fit the bill? No, I didn’t think so.

Hammett Bends the Silkworm

 

A few years ago, I wrote a radio drama about Dashiell Hammett. I’ve posted a scene from that play over at Silkworms Ink. You can read it here.

John Barry 1933-2011

I’ve been thinking about John Barry a lot recently, and listening to his film soundtracks while I work during the day. Here are two particular favourites. The first is one of the lushest, most exotic pieces of music I know. The second perfectly captures the boozy resignation I associate with Dashiell Hammett.

The Girl with the Sun in her Hair:

Hammett:

Joe Gores and Hammett

Joe Gores died this week. Like his inspiration, Dashiell Hammett, Gores had led one of those packed American lives. He’d worked as a logger, truck driver, carnival roustabout, motel manager, teacher in Kenya and, again like Hammett, as a detective. It was Gores’ twelve year experience as a gumshoe that led him to write mystery novels.

There are fine tributes to Gores at The Rap Sheet and Mystery File, which say far more than I could about Gores’ career and contribution to the crime story.

Gores’ novel Hammett (1975) put its eponymous hero in a San Francisco-set mystery involving crooked politicians, gangsters, Oriental femme fatales and ex-Pinkerton agents. As the mystery progresses, the seeds are sown in Hammett’s mind for his masterwork, The Maltese Falcon.

The novel was made into a film by Francis Ford Coppolla’s Zoetrope Studio. It was a famously troubled production, going through many drafts and two directors, Nicolas Roeg and Wim Wenders. It’s rumoured too that Coppolla reshot  some of the scenes in the final cut. Gores was philosophical about the thing, describing Wenders as having “a very poor sense of what makes a story work” but judging the end product as “a pretty good B picture”. (These quotes are pulled from an extensive interview with Gores and Ross Thomas, who worked on the screenplay, in the Spring 1984 issue of The Armchair Detective.)

It is a very strange movie, but weirdly hypnotic for the Hammett buff. Frederic Forrest is wonderful in the title role, and there are nice cameos for Elisha Cook Jnr, Sylvia Sidney, Samuel Fuller and Ross Thomas. Trying to replicate the feel of a Bogart movie, many of the exteriors are shot on studio sets, creating an oppressive, artificial world. Ultimately, it’s a film of pieces, where valuable fragments fail to make up a cohesive whole. But it’s a film I return to again and again.

 

Johnny Depp and The Thin Man

Over the course of my PhD, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and writing about MGM’s six Thin Man films. I’ve even crossed the Atlantic to speak about them. In the UK at least, these movies have faded from popular memory. As a result, I’ve explained the series’ premise in casual conversation countless times. “They’re films about a married couple who solve mysteries,” is my usual line of patter, followed by, “Based on a Dashiell Hammett novel. The guy who wrote Maltese Falcon?”

This week several sources reported Johnny Depp is now developing a remake. I suppose that means I won’t need to do any more explaining…

The poster that hangs in my living room.

Depp wants Rob Marshall to direct, with whom he is currently working on Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, and possible screenwriters are Terry Rossio, Jerry Stahl and Christopher McQuarrie. Depp has been quoted as saying, “The Thin Man has long been a favourite of mine and with Rob at the helm, I know we’re in great hands.”

There’s no news yet as to who’ll be playing Nora to Depp’s Nick (or who’s been cast as Asta). It’ll have to be a pretty sensational teaming to stand up to comparison with William Powell and Myrna Loy, the greatest of screen couples.

"He didn't come anywhere near my tabloids."

Most intriguing of all is the suggestion that this new adaptation will combine the plots of the first two MGM films, The Thin Man (1934) and After the Thin Man (1936). This got me wondering how Depp’s version will acknowledge the Powell and Loy films. After all, one of Depp’s most recent projects was Public Enemies (2009), which ended with the death of Dillinger outside a screening of Manhattan Melodrama (1934), the first Powell-Loy movie. Some reports suggest that Rob Marshall, who also directed Chicago (2002), is planning some musical numbers for the new film, which were a feature of the original series.

I think there is some potential in reviving Hammett’s Nick and Nora (who were somewhat harder-edged than Powell and Loy’s interpretation of the characters) and I’ll be interested to see how the film positions itself as a period piece.

What do you think? Is Depp good casting? Do we need another Thin Man?

The Guardian’s top 25 crime films

As I read through this list on Sunday, I couldn’t help comparing it to Dick Lochte’s recent collection of films, which I blogged about here. Of course, Lochte’s had the advantage of specificity – he was only writing about private eye films – and I think that led to some very interesting and unusual choices. It was a list that I learnt from, and I’m looking forward to hunting down some of those obscure gems.

Perhaps that’s the problem I have with The Guardian‘s choice. “Crime” is really too vague a classification, or at least it seems that way to me. Everything’s present and correct (detectives, gangsters, doomed lovers etc.) but at a very superficial level. Most strikingly, these are all either well-remembered or recent films. Perhaps intentionally, this looks less like a “top 25″ and more like a “top 25 available on DVD”.

Here is the list – as before, I’ve linked to the relevant Imdb pages for ease of reference.

1. Chinatown

2. Touch of Evil

3. Vertigo

4. Badlands

5. Rashomon

6. Double Indemnity

7. Get Carter

8. Pulp Fiction

9. Hidden

10. Goodfellas

11. Bonnie and Clyde

12. The Conversation

13. The Killing

14. The French Connection

15. The Big Sleep

16. La Ceremonie

17. Point Blank

18. Hard Boiled

19. A Prophet

20. The Long Good Friday

21. Scarface (1983, DePalma version)

22. Heat

23. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946, Garnett version)

24. Miller’s Crossing

25. Le Jour Se Leve

Of course, there are many fine films here. I’m pleased to see The Killing get a mention, one of the few Kubricks that I can stomach thanks to its wonderful performances and crisp Jim Thompson screenplay. Personally I’ve never been that fond of Bonnie and Clyde or The Postman Always Rings Twice, while the excesses of Hard Boiled and Heat just bore me. Miller’s Crossing is a decent enough pastiche of Hammett but why not go for the real thing? I’m astonished by the absence of The Maltese Falcon and by the selection of the 1983 Scarface over the 1932 version. And where’s Out of the Past?

The biggest omission for me is James Cagney. A star who shaped the progress of the gangster genre through performances in The Public Enemy, Angels with Dirty Faces, The Roaring Twenties and White Heat, Cagney has been somewhat forgotten in modern film culture. His absence here makes me suspicious of the list’s compilers (as does their illustration of The French Connection with a still from its sequel and of The Big Sleep with a photo of Bogie from the 1950s).

Over to you, gang. Which films are you pleased to see here, and what do you think should be on this list?

Dick Lochte’s Top 20 Private Eye Movies

Over at Ed Gorman’s blog, there’s a fantastic set of detective-related lists. Dick Lochte, the President of the Private Eye Writers of America, has compiled three lists of “Essentials”: Top 20 Private Eye Novels, Top 20 Private Eye Movies and Top 20 Tv Private Eyes! Naturally, my eyes immediately went to the list of movies. Here are Dick’s choices (and I’ve linked each title to its imdb page so you can follow up on those that intrigue you!):

1. The Maltese Falcon (Huston/Bogart version)

2. Chinatown

3. Murder, My Sweet

4. Out of the Past

5. The Big Sleep (the original, not the Mitchum-Winner remake)

6. Twilight (Lochte notes “with Paul Newman, not the vampire crap”!)

7. The Big Lebowski

8. Vertigo

9. Hickey and Boggs

10. Zero Effect

11. Kiss Me Deadly

12. Devil in a Blue Dress

13. Gumshoe

14. Farewell My Lovely

15. The Thin Man

16. Harper

17. My Favourite Brunette

18. Night Moves

19. Tony Rome

20. PJ

He also gives honourable mentions to The Big Fix, Michael Shayne Private Detective, Fast Company, The Runaround, Face Down, Nick Carter Master Detective, Hammett and Shamus.

I’m especially pleased to see the underrated Twilight, Gumshoe and Night Moves get mentions. Personally, I’d put The Thin Man a bit higher, but then I’m biased! And does anyone know where I can get a copy of Hickey and Boggs?

I can’t see any serious omissions, though I am fond of It’s a Wonderful World (1939, W.S. Van Dyke), which has James Stewart as a PI taking Claudette Colbert on a Capra-like adventure…

How about you, dear reader? Is your favourite Private Eye movie on the list?

Gumshoe trails #5

It’s been a while since I did one of these, so I thought I should pick something rather special. The Maltese Falcon (1941, John Huston) constantly tops polls of the greatest private eye films. It’s a very faithful adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s steely novel, with one of the great film ensembles.

Amazingly, this was Huston’s first film as director. No doubt his job was made much easier by his wonderful cast: Mary Astor as the duplicitous Brigid O’Shaughnessy, Peter Lorre as effeminate Joel Cairo, the expansive Sydney Greenstreet as Kasper Gutman and Elisha Cook Jnr. speaking through clenched teeth as the gunsel Wilmer.

This is the film that convinced Hollywood that Humphrey Bogart could be a romantic lead (in a sadistic kind of way). It’s a brilliant performance, by turns controlled, vicious and sardonic. Bogart is Sam Spade, and this is the film that made him a star.

The trailer displays many of those pleasurable features we’ve identified in others from the period. There’s the outré framing device, here Gutman addressing the audience directly. Look at the way he casts his eyes around, as though surveying those beneath him! Also, there are those wonderful captions describing the actors. I’m not going to spoil these ones. Just watch the video – they’re hysterical and yet magnificent.

Gumshoe trails #4

“Darling, you don’t need mystery. You’ve got something much better, something more alluring.” “What?” “Me!”

After the Thin Man (1936)

Gumshoe trails #3

This week I’ve picked one of the all-time odd trailers, for The Thin Man (1934, W.S. Van Dyke). There were six Thin Man films in all, starring William Powell and Myrna Loy as the crime-solving couple Nick and Nora Charles. I’ve spent a good part of the last three years writing about these movies, but they still charm and delight me. Powell had previously played the snooty detective Philo Vance in a series of films, and that fact structures this trailer.

Camera trickery allows Powell as Vance to chat with Powell as Nick Charles. Oh, and did I mention that Nick is standing in a giant-sized book when the trailer starts? It’s a nod to the cover image of Dashiell Hammett’s novel, which pictured the author as its hero.

Hammett posing as Nick Charles

Even with this knowledge, that massive prop book is fabulously barmy! As I’ve said before (and will no doubt say again), I wish trailers were still like this! Going to the cinema would be so much more fun…

Trivia fiends: Chris Jorgenson is played by Cesar Romero, some thirty years before he played The Joker.