Rating: 4
It was Bryan Forbes who said John Barry doesn’t need a thousand violins to convey emotion. Perfectly illustrated here. Hammett stands out amongst Barry’s American works, for not since the sixties themselves has he been so original and effortlessly classy.
Hammett (like Frances, Body Heat and The Cotton Club) throws back to an old style of Hollywood that Barry would have known from his cinema youth. The film celebrates the detective fiction of Dashiell Hammett by placing the famous writer in one of his own stories. The notion that Hammett’s story is fantastically intertwined with the novel he has written is suggested by the film’s calculated exaggeration of film noir codes — fashion, gloom, sharp suits, sharp talking and deep cynicism. Likewise, Barry’s music is very self-aware. It indulgences in the musical codes of cheap crime fiction.
The refreshing change for Hammett is that it is less the orchestral score and more the ensemble blues score for piano, flute and clarinet. There is not a string in sight for the main theme. When strings are used they are merely the instrument of the hallucinatory and anxious textures that sit behind the principal instruments. The accompanying Chinese instrumentation (a rare use of ethnic styles) and source jazz music that puts John Barry up with Harry James simply add to the multitude of reasons that Hammett is the exemplary low-key score.
Barry shows perfect understanding for point of view in this picture. He brilliant bridges the triangular relationship between film-maker, film and viewer.