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Q: Has anyone ever made a film adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's novel "Red Harvest"?

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Author: 
Adam Thomlison / TV Media

No, but people have come close, in two different ways.

Salon.com's Allen Barra, in an extensive article about the 75th anniversary of Hammett's first novel, details a number of times people have tried to make film versions of "Red Harvest." No one succeeded, but people have also come close in another sense -- by sneaking elements of it into other movies.

Barra argues that the reason a straight adaptation never got off the ground was political. In the late '40s and early '50s, at the height of Hammett's popularity and of the hard-boiled crime genre he helped create, the novel's pro-union sentiment got it caught up in the Red Scare that was tearing Hollywood apart.

By the time all that died down, interest in the novel, and in Hammett, had waned.

However, we can see shades of the book in a couple of recent productions. The most obvious is the 1990 noir film "Miller's Crossing" by Joel and Ethan Coen. That film borrows elements from "Red Harvest" as well as another Hammett novel, "The Glass Key."

David Milch, creator of HBO's popular western series "Deadwood," said in an interview that there was a lot of "Red Harvest" in that show. Both were set in a midwestern mining town and both are "unapologetic in looking at that aspect of America."

"Red Harvest" features a nameless detective solving a murder in a corrupt mining town. Though it's a crime novel set in the 1920s, it's considered to have influenced, and been influenced, by the western genre as well.

 

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