Red Harvest - Adaptations

Adaptations

Red Harvest was adapted for the 1930 film Roadhouse Nights, starring Helen Morgan, Fred Kohler, and Jimmy Durante. Many major elements of the book were changed in the film, including most of the characters' names, and the film is not considered a faithful adaptation.

Akira Kurosawa scholar David Desser and critic Manny Farber, among others, state that Red Harvest was the inspiration for Kurosawa's film Yojimbo. Other scholars, such as Donald Richie, believe the similarities are coincidental. Kurosawa said that a major source for the plot was the film noir classic The Glass Key (1942), an adaption of Hammett's 1931 novel of the same name. In Red Harvest, The Glass Key, and Yojimbo, corrupt officials and businessmen stand behind and profit from the rule of gangsters. Other films based on Yojimbo include Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars and Walter Hill's Last Man Standing.

In the early 70s, Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci considered filming an adaptation of the novel and wrote a first draft infused with political themes typical of his work. A short while after he wrote a second draft that was more faithful to Hammett's story. For the role of the Op he considered Robert Redford, Jack Nicholson, who had played a hard-boiled detective in Roman Polanski's neo-noir film Chinatown, and Clint Eastwood, who had played the Op-inspired "Man with No Name" in Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy. At some point Bertolucci discussed this project with Warren Beatty in Rome. In 1982 Bertolucci moved to Los Angeles to begin production, but the project was shelved.

The Coen brothers film Miller's Crossing (1990) employs stylistic and narrative elements of Hammett's The Glass Key, Red Harvest and several of Hammett's shorter works. The Coens' Blood Simple (1984) takes its title from a line in Red Harvest in which the Op tells Brand that the escalating violence has affected his mental state: "This damned burg's getting me. If I don't get away soon I'll be going blood-simple like the natives."

Science-fiction writer David Drake has said that he took the plot of his novel The Sharp End from Red Harvest.

Cory Doctorow reviewed Steven Brust's novel Jhegaala as "Steve Brust doing Hammett's Red Harvest".