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Turns out The American Friend was Francis Ford Coppola, with Zoetrope Studios as the box trap. "Let me ask you a literary question." San Francisco in the Twenties, just the shadowy playpen for a certain Dashiell (Frederic Forrest). With his stories still unpublished, the noir icons are acquaintances rattling in the whiskey brain of the hard-boiled "village idiot." The case at hand involves the old employer (Peter Boyle), a missing Chinatown temptress (Lydia Lei), the come-hither librarian downstairs (Marilu Henner), a Kasper Gutman stand-in (Roy Kinnear), and a lost manuscript. Salacious snapshots lead to the city's ruling class, one treacherous skirmish at a time. "Physical heroism is not in the writer's métier, my friend." Wim Wenders and classical Hollywood, an antiseptic laboratory experiment and a handsome muddle. Genre veterans perk up the proceedings: Sylvia Sidney is around as a link to City Streets, Samuel Fuller probably suggested the inside-out view of the typewriter at work. The cavalcade of facsimiles reaches some kind of apex as a rubout in a makeshift porn studio is witnessed through a two-way mirror—a screen-within-a-screen of David Patrick Kelly as Elisha Cook Jr. in The Maltese Falcon opposite Jack Nance as Elisha Cook Jr. in The Big Sleep while the real Elisha Cook Jr. waits outside in the cab. "Who the hell are you? Hammett the author or Hammett the detective?" "You forgot Hammett the fool." It builds to the image of the venture's pages floating in the water, the one who "lost everything except the nerve" might be the disillusioned director who'd parlay the experience into The State of Things. Hodges' Pulp is an instructive precursor. Cinematography by Joseph Biroc. With R.G. Armstrong, Richard Bradford, Michael Chow, and Royal Dano.
--- Fernando F. Croce |