Hammett

In 1928 San Francisco, Dashiell Hammett works as a private detective while struggling with tuberculosis and heavy drinking. He writes pulp stories on the side, drawing on his own cases. When an old colleague, Jimmy Ryan, asks for help, Hammett becomes drawn into the search for a young woman who has disappeared from Chinatown. The investigation leads him through a city of secrets and brings him into contact with figures who would rather he stopped asking questions.

Wim Wenders directed the film, the fourth of the twenty-two features he has made and the one that followed The American Friend in 1977 and preceded Paris, Texas in 1984. Dennis O'Flaherty and Ross Thomas wrote the screenplay, and the producer credits include Ronald Colby, Don Guest and Fred Roos. Frederic Forrest plays Hammett, with Peter Boyle as Jimmy Ryan, Marilu Henner as Kit Conger, Roy Kinnear as English Eddie Hagedorn, Lydia Lei as Crystal Ling and Elisha Cook Jr. as Eli the Taxi Driver. American Zoetrope produced the film, which runs 98 minutes.

On IMDb, the film holds a rating of 6.4 out of 10 from around 4,000 votes, while on TMDB it has a 6.2 from 81 votes. A critics' rating of 6.7 from 12 reviews places it slightly above the audience scores, though the small number of reviews makes that gap modest. The vote counts on both audience platforms suggest a limited but steady following rather than wide attention.