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Hammett's Flitcraft Parable, The Stepfather, and the Significance of Falling Beams
Literature Film Quarterly, 2006 by Harris, Martin
The Stepfather, an independent film shot in Canada and directed by Joseph Ruben, earned scant notice at the time of its release in early 1987. The film combines elements of eighties-variety horror/slasher pictures, movie-of-the-week romance thrillers, and detective stories, the latter likely due in large part to screenwriter and story co-author Donald E. Westlake, author of dozens of commercially successful novels in the hardboiled tradition of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. The Stepfather tells of Jerry Blake (Terry O'Quinn), a real estate agent who has recently married into the family of a pretty widow, Susan (Shelley Hack), and her daughter, Stephanie (Jill Schoelen). While Susan adores Jerry, describing him as the "perfect" husband and father, Stephanie suspects Jerry is not the man he appears to be. "There's just something about him," she tells a friend, unwittingly uttering a truth of which she is not yet aware. As the film's unsettling opening sequence has already shown, one year earlier Jerry had murdered his previous family in a nearby city. We eventually learn "Jerry Blake" is a pseudonym, as was his earlier identity, "Henry Morrison," and that Jerry is what might be called a "serial stepfather" who repeatedly insinuates himself into an already established family, marries the widow or divorcée, then once the family fails to live up to his ideal vision for them he kills them and moves on to start the cycle anew. Stephanie's suspicions (and other factors) eventually urge Jerry to start again and make preparations for yet another identity ("Bill Hodgkins") in another city as a prelude to doing away with Susan and Stephanie. In a final showdown, complicated somewhat by the surprise appearance of Jerry's former brother-in-law, Jim Ogilvie (Stephen Schellen), Susan and Stephanie together succeed in killing Jerry before he can kill them.
From a commercial standpoint. The Stepfather was a disappointment; its box office receipts failing even to match its modest $3 million budget. Several factors contributed to The Stepfather's poor commercial showing. As an independently produced and distributed film, The Stepfather was never widely distributed in the United States, showing on only 105 screens the weekend of its January 1987 premiere. None of the film's cast was especially recognizable to audiences at the time of its release. Nor was Ruben, then known primarily as a director of exploitative teen sex comedies (The Pom-Pom Girls, Jovride, Corp) and one moderately successful sci-fi adventure, Dreamscape (1984), likely much of a draw.1 Donald Westlake's involvement as scriptwriter may well have interested fans of his novels, although the film's promotion essentially suppressed The Stepfather's connection with detective stories in favor of highlighting its affinity with the psychokiller/slasher genre made popular during the eighties by the Friday the 13th, Halloween, and Nightmare on Elm Street series. One sees such an emphasis in the film's advertisements. Posters for the film feature a man, ostensibly Jerry, in silhouette brandishing a knife. In one version, he stands over the bloody corpse of Ogilvie; in another, a smiling Stephanie clutches her dog in the foreground. Trailers for The Stepfather all feature an embellished version of the film's opening scene, with Jerry tracing the words "Who Am I Here?" (a line he utters near the film's conclusion) into a foggy bathroom mirror before punching through it. Reviewers of The Stepfather, their expectations perhaps lowered by the film's promotional campaign, were mixed in their responses to the film. While a few appreciated its clever blending of generic conventions, others viewed it simply as a failed horror film. On video and cable television, the film eventually achieved minor cult status, enough to encourage the production of two sequels (minus Ruben and Westlake's involvement) despite the original's commercial failure.2
In the years since, The Stepfather has garnered occasional critical attention, often in the form of brief, favorable allusions to the film in other contexts. Only two extended analyses have appeared, both emphasizing the film's subversion of slasher film conventions as a means to advance a feminist agenda.3 In what follows, I want instead to reconsider the film in light of its relationship to detective fiction, particularly highlighting The Stepfather's apparent indebtedness to a brief yet significant digression in Dashiell Hammett's 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon, an anecdote told by Sam Spade commonly referred to as the "Flitcraft parable." A kind of cornerstone of Hammett studies, the Flitcraft parable has been examined closely by those who see the story providing an important key to Hammett's feelings about the meaning (or lack thereof) of human existence as well as his attitude toward his craft. The parable raises important questions about the sources of self-identity, the significance of morality, and the interconnectedness of the two, illustrating as it does how our awareness of who we are both influences and is influenced by our interactions with others. Besides exploring these same questions, The Stepfather also shares a number of other parallels with the Flitcraft parable, some remarkable in their similarity. Considering Westlake's familiarity with Hammett, there exists the strong possibility that the Flitcraft parable, besides revealing significant information about Hammett, also provides a key to understanding The Stepfather.
