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SUBSTANCE INTO SHADOW 191
close shots, has the lines spoken at break-neck speed and has edited the film with a respect for detail yet with an unrelenting drive which is also characteristic of Hammett's writing. The marvellously sustained sequence towards the end of the story, when the whole bizarre group of crooks is forced to spend a whole night together waiting for the loot, is shot by Huston in a series of long-lasting shots composed in depth. The compositions, like Hammett's prose, are unspectacular but precise : a good deal of care has quite obviously been devoted to them. They focus exclusively on the conflicts between personalities, rarely isolating single figures or bringing the background to the spectator's notice.
Where the film gains over the novel is in its ability to compress the action into the space of ninety minutes' viewing. It has, therefore, an immediacy of appeal and a compactness which a novel even when read at a single sitting cannot equal. Where Hammett's chapters all end with a surprise or minor revelation but tend to sag a little in the middle, Huston's control of pace assures an even pitch of excitement. Another immense asset is derived from the cinema's ability to let the spectator see the characters an advantage which is fully exploited by the casting. A more perfectly right cast has, surely, never been assembled in a film. It is impossible, re-reading the novel, not to see Brigid O'Shaughnessy in the shape of Mary Astor or Casper Gutman as Sidney Greenstreet. In a style of narrative in which everything depends on surface observation, the cinema has here a tremendous advantage : the appearances come to the spectator at first hand and there is no room for the sort of ambiguities which a reader's associations inevitably supply to even the sharpest prose.
In spite of its remarkable felicity, Huston's method of capturing the novel's flavour is not to be taken as a working model of screen adaptation. For a director to be able to submerge his personality beneath that of the novelist, without