He’s a hero all the same, a man on his own, maneuvering among the crocodiles, frequently with fists and firepower, always with a brutal and amusing efficiency. Short, overweight, often a little drunk, the Op is no movie star. Virtually all of them, the hoods, the lawmen, the lowlifes, the local grandees, are lying and corrupt. Kurosawas loose and darkly funny adaptation of Dashiell Hammetts Red Harvest is a visually expressive marvel. Here the Op finds himself in a corrupt western town where there’s a power struggle among contending factions. The glitter and rot of the Roaring Twenties had reached a crescendo by October, the Wall Street Crash would usher in a decade of privation so acute it threatened the foundations of Western capitalism. Transferred to samurai-era Japan, it was the basis for Kurosawa’s great film Yojimbo.) With the Continental Op, a detective he had been developing for years in short stories, Hammett created the prototype for every sleuth who would ever be called “hard-boiled.” And with his witty, economical prose-”I said: ‘Hello.’ “-Hammett gave machismo its own terse lyricism. Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest was published in February 1929, an auspicious moment in American history. (For the record, there is a movie of this book, too. Though less famous than The Maltese Falcon or The Thin Man, which both have the advantage of their pitch-perfect movie adaptations, this tale of omnidirectional treachery is the man at his deadly best. Where did we first hear the voice of the world-weary American tough guy in its purest distillation? In Dashiell Hammett, a former Pinkerton detective, and in this book, his first novel. A biker called RAMBO Director Umberto Lenzi Cast Tomás Milián Joseph Cotten María Fiore Mario Piave Did you find subtitles for this one Huh-huh.
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