The Red Frame

Like many of us in the worldwide pandemic, I set stationed in my home trying to determine what to do with this bleak, unforeseeable future I had on my hands. It was inside this blank slate of time, I discovered crime fiction and two of my favorite authors of all time. These two I’d come to consider as the grandfathers of the hard-boiled genre as we know it: Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

In this insurmountable time I could also watch their mostly lackluster film adaptations. In the moment I felt like I found an untapped resource. As I read and watched, I realized I had never seen a film that quite captured the essence and experience in one of these books. An experience which clouded my own waking life at the time. For example their lives felt muddled, always bleak. They might solve a case by the end, but it almost never guaranteed a happy ending. Their future came at the roll of a dice. Atmosphere and character came over plot. The entire story blossomed from the central character’s P.O.V.. We never left their side. I didn’t believe any film had come close to capturing all of these elements at once or the true spirit of this genre from the masters who coined it.