Anyone else catch this? I love some pulp crime, so it’s cool to see the literary sources get referenced like this. Basic plot is the same as the Swayze one, but in the new movie a teen girl at a bookstore straight up calls out Gyllenhaal as a pulp Western protagonist and the movie takes place in the fictional Florida islands of Glass Key and Harvest Key.
The Glass Key and Red Harvest are both Dashiell Hammett books (if not nearly as well known as the Maltese Falcon). And both are the direct inspirations for Yojimbo, Fistful of Dollars, Tokyo Drifter, Last Man Standing, Miller’s Crossing, Django, and a million other “stoic stranger drops into a corrupt town and tears it all down” movies.
The adaptation history of Red Harvest is one of my favorite things in media. From pulp noir western (plus some John Ford) to samurai movie to spaghetti western to mod Japanese noir to Depression noir western to bizarre Japanese western, the base story has had a wild history over the last almost 100 years.
by mr_snips