You're right. It would make a cool movie.
And it did. Multiple times.
The legendary Akira Kurosawa liked it so much, he turned it into "Yojimbo"....... with the Continental Op turned into Toshiro Mifune's wandering samurai......
And the equally legendary Sergio Leone like "Yojimbo" so much, he turned it into "A Fistful Of Dollars"......with the Continental Op goin' way out to the Spaghetti West, transformed into Clint Eastwood's laconic, fast-triggered Man With No Name........
What's amazing is that no filmmaker has ever gotten around to making a movie from the original source material, Dashiell Hammet's blazingly violent novel.
The Op, short, overweight but gifted with steely nerve and an iron will, arrives in a gangster-ridden hellhole name Personville (though more accurately referred to by one and all as Poisonville).
Pissed off by his client's prompt murder and the corrupt police chief's attempts to bump him off as well, the Op cleverly arranges an all-out, blood drenched civil war between Personville's many rival, murderous factions. (......accomplished with the belligerent help of Dinah Brand, the town's dominant, domineering femme fatale floozy, forever on the prowl for quick cash and a snort of bootleg booze)
The body count reaches the proportions of a Middle East war........even the hard-boiled Op succumbs to some rare soul-searching over all the death he's engineered.
Not that any of that brief introspection stops the tidal wave of mayhem, as just about everybody gets what they deserve via knives, ice picks and good old fashioned bullets.
Told almost entirely in Hammet's rat-a-tat snappy dialogue, "Red Harvest" is a true American original classic, the darkest of urban fairy tales spun by a master of his genre.
If you haven't heard of this book or read it yet.......time to get Op and around......for one crazy ride through a corpse-strewn landscape, "Red Harvest" remains one of our favorite cups of blood.........we'll shoot out 5 on-target stars (*****), a BQ FIND OF FINDS.
No comments:
Post a Comment