This article examines the nuance of aging masculinity presented in hard-boiled detective fiction, something that is frequently lost amid sleek Hollywood portrayals of these characters. The detectives ...of this genre are inevitably middle-aged men and agingalong with vulnerabilityis thus a fundamental, if often disavowed, element of the form. Among the early authors of this school, Raymond Chandler proves to be the most reflective on the topic of mortality. This article examines The Long Goodbye (1953) as a guiding illustration of hard-boiled insights into aging, along with supporting examples from the genres history, particularly the works of Dashiell Hammett. The question of hard-boiled realism is of special note to this discussion, as these works ostensibly offer a platform for more true representations of male bodies as they age. However, Chandlers hard-boiled realism, typified in the 1944 essay The Simple Art of Murder, bases authenticity on style and language rather than on verisimilitude. This conflicting realism undoubtedly explains the halting representations of aging in hard-boiled fiction. The detectives experience of age can be disavowed with a well-chosen quip or a well-placed right hook. This essay will read this inherent tensionthat is, between articulation and renunciation with respect to male aging within the hard-boiled ethos.
As the father of the hardboiled detective genre, Dashiell Hammett had a huge influence on Hollywood. Yet, it is easy to forget how adaptable Hammett's work was, fitting into a variety of genres and ...inspiring generations of filmmakers.
Dashiell Hammett and the Moviesoffers the first comprehensive look at Hammett's broad oeuvre and how it was adapted into films from the 1930s all the way into the 1990s. Film scholar William H. Mooney reveals the wide range of films crafted from the same Hammett novels, as whenThe Maltese Falconwas filmed first as a pre-Code sexploitation movie, then as a Bette Davis screwball comedy, and finally as the Humphrey Bogart classic. He also considers how Hammett rose to Hollywood fame not through the genre most associated with him, but through a much fizzier concoction, the witty murder mysteryThe Thin Man. To demonstrate the hold Hammett still has over contemporary filmmakers, the book culminates in an examination of the Coen brothers' pasticheMiller's Crossing.
Mooney not only provides us with an in-depth analysis of Hammett adaptations, he also chronicles how Hollywood enabled the author's own rise to stardom, complete with a celebrity romance and a carefully crafted public persona. Giving us a behind-the-scenes look at the complex power relationships, cultural contexts, and production concerns involved in bringing Hammett's work from the page to the screen,Dashiell Hammett and the Moviesoffers a fresh take on a literary titan.
Dashiell Hammett's service in the US Army during World War I uniquely connected him to its almost infinite trauma. As an ambulance driver in the war's final year, Hammett transported those wounded at ...the Battle of Cantigny and Belleau Wood from the Port of Philadelphia to the clearing stations at Fort Meade. Driving the boxy Ford ambulance back and forth, wheeling the wounded into the crowded wards, hearing the groans, having the nightmares, and seeing the endless parade of those physically and mentally scarred in the trenches, all day, every day, Hammett internalized the lessons of shell shock and hysteria (Ward 39–43). Hammett's novel, The Maltese Falcon (1929), and the 1941 John Huston adaptation, one of the first golden age noir films, are both explorations of the inheritance of WWI's mechanized warfare, masculine hysteria, and its lasting impact on an elusive historical hysteria in masculine performance. More than an immensely popular and influential book and film, Hammett's Sam Spade and the actor who would come to personify him, Humphrey Bogart, are instrumental in creating an iconic image of masculine fantasy, an ideal ego: the hardboiled tough guy. With his ironic sneer and his snap-brim fedora, Humphrey Bogart's Sam Spade presents an alluring masculine fantasy that has long outlived its moment of cultural creation in the disillusioned space between WWI and WWII. This character has become a rhetorical structure, repeated in TV, films, and popular music beyond the bounds of white, Western culture. In fact, Dashiell Hammett calls Spade “a dream man” in his 1934 “Introduction” to the novel's Modern Library edition (qtd. in Anderson 381). As for Huston's adaptation, Frank Krutnik puts it bluntly: “The Maltese Falcon constitutes the detective-hero, Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart), as an ideal ego”. That ideal ego, both in the novel and in the film, is hysterical, and that hysteria is deeply rooted in the genealogy of the hardboiled hero: late Victorian British and American adventure fiction. The Maltese Falcon reimagines the imperial and urban adventure fiction of the 1880s romance revival (Robert Louis Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) already appropriated by American writers, like S. S. Van Dine in his Philo Vance series. Hammett's novel also incorporates the language of uncompromising independence and fierce individualism from western heroes inaugurated by Owen Wister's genre-defining novel, The Virginian, dedicated to America's number one tough guy, Teddy Roosevelt. These antecedent texts, supplemented by a universe of boy's magazines, like The Boy's Own Paper (1879–1967) and The American Boy (1899–1941), generically reenact the inherited hegemonic rhetoric of transatlantic bourgeois masculinity, that is to say, Victorian masculinity, and its core concept: moral and physical toughness create social value. This system of values makes up one side of the hysterical performance of hardboiled masculinity. The other side, embodied in Ernest Hemingway's damaged yet stoic heroes, is defined by the impossibility of enacting that core concept because the Great War ruined the easy replication of Victorian cultural narratives forever. Hardboiled fiction and films thus became one of the spaces where the collision between inherited Victorian gender values and emerging modernity is written and rewritten into an ideal male ego, hysterically trying to reconcile the two. The impossible reconciliation between the inherited language of masculinity and modernity repeats itself in a circle of aggression and impotence that renders the hardboiled tough guy a hardboiled hysteric.
Les albums de la série Silex Files du Belge Philippe Foerster - Chaînons manquants (2002), Le Silence des fossiles (2003) et Psycho-Sapiens (2004) - constituent un exemple original de transmédialité. ...Car ils conjuguent la veine bien connue de la bande dessinée et du film d'animation héritiere des Flintstones, relative a une vision intentionnellement anachronique de la préhistoire, avec la tradition de la littérature policiere et du film noir nord-américains. Notre contribution vise, des lors, a analyser dans le langage verbal et graphique de cette trilogie l'intégration des différents traits caractéristiques du genre du film noir américain, aux niveaux structurel, thématique et esthétique. Pour ce faire, nous releverons les diverses références intertextuelles et cinématographiques qui parsement les aventures du détective protagoniste Rex Raw, entre hommage et parodie, grâce a l'humour particulier du dessinateur et scénariste francophone.
This essay argues for Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon as an example of world literature, following Damrosch’s foundational definition. It considers how The Maltese Falcon circulates in ...translation and how shifting relationship between source and receiving cultures continually remake the novel and unpick straightforward understandings of ownership. As such, the essay explores the implications of issues arising from two English to French translations of the novel to think about another facet of circulation and another form of exchange: the complicated equivalence between commodities, money, and gold thematized by Hammett and the consequent uncertainties facing the global economy.
The publisher's brief summary lower down on the back cover states that Grave Digger and Coffin Ed "attempt to maintain some kind of order on the streets of Harlem," continuing that "Harlem's toughest ...detective duo, must carry the day against an absurdist world of racism and class warfare." ...masculine "toughness" is the best hope for the Black community of Harlem to combat absurdity and "chaos" and reestablish "order." According to Leonard Cassuto, "The only hope of redemption in Himes's carnival of violence lies in his detective heroes" (229). Supplementing Nieland's reading of Blind Man with a Pistol, I think this lack of "efficacy" can be read quite differently in his earlier All Shot Up, a novel that, written in 1960 before the Black Power movement gained its late 1960s traction, and at quite a different moment in Himes's career, is more overtly constructed as a reversal or a hijacking of earlier pulp hardboiled works rather than one particularly concerned with directly critiquing specific political movements.7 Thus, I am interested less in how portrayals of queer Harlem clearly relate to political "efficacy" than in how they could be read more as what Pim Higginson calls "defiantly unproductive" or "frivolous" literature that does not seek a "potency" of direct political engagement. squares and cross-dressers in the harlem cycle In part originating in nineteenth-century blackface performance and vaudeville, the Black man in drag can represent "A painfully familiar stereotype—that of the feminized Black man, disempowered and made ridiculous, the object of the (white majority) gaze" (Garber 269).
Samuel Dashiell Hammett (“Dash”), American author and activist, is today best known for one of the novels he published 1930, The Maltese Falcon. My thesis presents evidence that a close study of a ...selection of Hammett’s short stories and novels published between 1925 and 1930 (“Dead Yellow Women,” “The Scorched Face,” “The Gutting of Couffignal,” Red Harvest, and The Maltese Falcon) exposes his personal struggle with modernity in America, through a discussion of three motifs. In his stories and novels, Hammett explores the fluctuating treatment of immigrants, and changing social spaces for newly independent women in post-World War I America. He also questions the consequences of increasing mechanization in cities, through everyman detectives Sam Spade and the Continental Op. As Hammett’s career progresses, he continues to passionately challenge the benefits of conservative cultural values, while urging caution against the unreserved embrace of modernism.Research for this paper originated with a close study of Hammett’s letters, and several biographies (including Layman and Ward). A range of critics contributed to a discussion of Hammett as a modernist author (e.g. Wheat and Norman). Articles on post-World War I literature were also essential to my research (e.g. Tate and Stevenson). A review of the available material demonstrated the need to analyze Hammett’s complex relationship with modernity, and how the bond evolved over time. While Hammett establishes specific motifs early in his career, it is not until 1930 that he standardizes his unique portrayal of modernism in American cities, and urges readers to approach modernism in America with cautious optimism.
Something of a dandy, drawn to the tuxedo life, Tennessee Williams unleashed a gritty, working-class modernity with his theatrical revolution in which undergarments grew emblematic. Williams's images ...of post-War masculinity would resonate with his protégé, William Inge, continue on the stage, into the iconography of film and further extend through the youth rebellion of the 1950s and 60s, into the tie dye era of the 60s and 70s and the grunge of the 1980s and 90s generating a general shift in American public appearance from suits to sweats. What is here called T-shirt Modernism became acceptable public dress and an emblem of masculinity. Such a tectonic shift in haberdashery and its concomitant exaggerated hyper masculinity owe much to the theatrical revolution unleashed on the Broadway stage by Tennessee Williams (and his collaborators) in December of 1947.
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