A salute to Dashiell Hammett, in particular Red Harvest, although the absence here of a hero on the right side of the law greatly embellishes (or truly establishes) the moral chaos that some people so obligingly see in Hammett. Overrated as a novelist, the creator of Sam Spade and the Continental Op was nevertheless well within his range as an author of a comic strip (Secret Agent X-9), and there are plenty of lines in Joel and Ethan Coen's screenplay which would look just right in balloons over the speakers' heads: "Take your flunky and dangle," "Jesus, you're a prickly pear," "The last time we jawed, you gave me the high hat," and so on. There are plenty of lengthier speeches as well, no less evocatively written, and they are delivered against a hushed background, with no assistance from a nudging soundtrack, so that they are allowed to create their own kind of music. They are staged in what the French used to call the plan américain -- the hips-and-up, thighs-and-up, eye-level compositions of the classical American cinema -- and in dark but sharply delineated interiors, with the visual tones of well-polished furniture or gun metal. The general feeling is calm, comfortable, cozy. Some might find this slightly dull, especially with no one more glamorous and attractive to identify with than the sourly smart-aleck Gabriel Byrne. Others will find it not only audacious -- the Coen brothers risking instant revocation of the creative license granted them after Raising Arizona -- but also a brilliantly patient strategy to better set off the intermittent outbursts of violence: the increasingly comic roughing-ups suffered by the protagonist (aptly nicknamed "Little Miss Punching Bag" by a vicious homosexual thug), plus one spectacular shootout while "Danny Boy" rotates on the Victrola. The exceedingly dense plot -- an elegant and ironic variation on the theme of honor among thieves -- requires, and repays, the closest attention. Albert Finney, Jon Polito. (1990) — Duncan Shepherd