The End of the Trail: The American West of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler

Porter, Joseph C.

doi:10.2307/967777

The Western Historical Quarterly

1975

DOI: 10.2307/967777

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The End of the Trail: The American West of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler

Joseph C. Porter

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The ‘Corkscrew’ Journey of an Adaptation: Cultural Mobility in Hammett, Kurosawa, Leone, and Hill

Holtz¹

2021

Adaptation

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Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961) has long been recognized as a quasi-adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest (1929), even if it relates much more closely to Hammett’s short story ‘Corkscrew’ (1925). Yojimbo was remade as the Italian Western Fistful of Dollars (1964) by Sergio Leone. The material finally ‘came home’ when Walter Hill adapted it as Last Man Standing (1996) that returns to the 1920s American desert town setting of the original story. This contribution seeks to examine the inflections of the individual incarnations that the material has undergone on its journey through various cultural contexts. The main argument is that the story of the outsider infiltrating a corrupt town and ‘cleansing’ it by playing off two gangs against each other has lent itself to commentary on transnational cultural exchange and mobility. ‘Corkscrew’ expresses anxiety over the integrity of cultural boundaries, Red Harvest expresses the inherent corruption of a ‘hermetic’ culture, Yojimbo uses the story to highlight the uneasy relation between tradition and Westernization in Japan while simultaneously drawing attention to Kurosawa’s status as ‘Western’ director and embraces a guarded cultural mobility, Fistful of Dollars empties the signs, icons, and narratives that make up the expressions of culture of any essentialist meanings and so stages cultural mobility as the shifting play of signifiers, endlessly transgressing acquired meanings and cultural boundaries, and Last Man Standing, finally, in reclaiming the Americanness of the story simultaneously forgoes any cultural specificity by reducing it to an excessive pastiche of prior elements.

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The ‘Corkscrew’ Journey of an Adaptation: Cultural Mobility in Hammett, Kurosawa, Leone, and Hill

Holtz¹

2021

Adaptation

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'I Killed Him for the Money': The American Dream in Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity

Thomas

2009

OPT

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‘I killed him for money – and a woman - I didn’t get the money and I didn’t get the woman. Pretty isn’t it?’ (Wilder 1944). So begins Walter Neff’s (Fred MacMurray) confession in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, a confession that tells how he fell for femme fatale Phyllis Dietrichson, how he planned and undertook the murder of her husband, and attempted to claim the life insurance he had himself sold to the dead man. The audience also hears that Neff’s actions aroused the suspicions of his boss and mentor, Keyes, and led to a shoot out with Phyllis that proves fatal for both. Hence that famous opening line. More than just an example of Raymond Chandler’s and Wilder’s pithy dialogue, the line encapsulates the film’s criticism of the American ideal. Neff’s future of upward mobility and a loving wife is gone. Furthermore, in the course of pursuing this dream, he has destroyed a family, attempted to cheat his employer and murdered a typical hard-working citizen. With this statement comes the verbal proof of what the plot goes on to demonstrate: the American Dream is dead

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The End of the Trail: The American West of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

The ‘Corkscrew’ Journey of an Adaptation: Cultural Mobility in Hammett, Kurosawa, Leone, and Hill

The ‘Corkscrew’ Journey of an Adaptation: Cultural Mobility in Hammett, Kurosawa, Leone, and Hill

'I Killed Him for the Money': The American Dream in Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity

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