The Maltese Falcon ***** (1941, Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Gladys George, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre) – Classic Movie Review 722

John Huston’s 1941 classic The Maltese Falcon is a movie masterpiece of film noir, lovingly derived from Dashiell Hammett’s renowned detective thriller novel. Humphrey Bogart relishes one of his most iconic roles as the gumshoe Sam Spade.

Writer-director John Huston’s 1941 classic The Maltese Falcon is a movie masterpiece of film noir, lovingly and faithfully derived from Dashiell Hammett’s renowned, celebrated detective thriller novel, previously made in 1931 as The Maltese Falcon with Ricardo Cortez and Bebe Daniels and again in 1936 as Satan Met a Lady with Bette Davis.

In his superstar-making part, Humphrey Bogart relishes one of his most iconic roles as the wisecracking, cynical gumshoe Sam Spade, a real rough diamond who sets off down those San Francisco mean streets after the ancient black Maltese Falcon statuette, a priceless 16th-century art object, now apparently missing and worth killing and dying for.

Spade’s partner at the San Francisco detective agency, Miles Archer (Jerome Cowan), soon turns up dead and so does someone called Floyd Thursby. And Spade is suspected by the police of one or both murders. But he has got to protect his beautiful new client who, at least at first, goes by the name of Miss Ruth Wonderly, who claims Thursby has run off with her sister.

The cast are perfect matches for the vintage quirky characters – from Bogart’s king-of-cool private eye anti-hero, via Mary Astor’s stylish, treacherous femme fatale Brigid O’Shaughnessy, Peter Lorre’s fey and fussy Joel Cairo and Elisha Cook Jnr’s scared gun-toting hitman ‘gunsel’ Wilmer Cook, and finally on to Sydney Greenstreet’s monstrously slimy villain Kasper Gutman, aka the Fat Man.

Barton MacLane (as hard-pressed Lieutenant of Detectives Dundy), Lee Patrick (as Spade’s loyal secretary Effie Perine), Gladys George (as Miles Archer’s brittle wife Iva Archer), Ward Bond (as bemused Detective Tom Polhaus) and (very briefly in a cameo) the director’s father Walter Huston (as ship’s Captain Jacoby who staggers into Spade’s office with the Falcon and promptly dies) are also in the Forties dream cast.

It is a stupendous movie director debut by Huston, incredibly intense, atmospheric, thrilling, powerful, taut and at the same time remarkably subtle. Of course he had a great novel to work on, one of hardboiled fiction’s greatest. But his screenplay is packed to overflowing with sizzling dialogue, cynical wit, grotesque characters, memorable protagonists and, beneath it all, a putrid smell of desperation and greed. It is the perfect flavour of Dashiell Hammett.

And Hammett? He worked as a private detective for the Pinkerton Detective Agency in San Francisco, and uses his own name of Sam for his detective. He was Samuel Dashiell Hammett (May 27, 1894 – January 10, 1961). Kasper Gutman was based on Maundy Gregory, a fat British detective-entrepreneur who was involved in a search for a long-lost treasure like the Falcon, and Joel Cairo was based on a criminal Hammett arrested for forgery in Pasco, Washington, in 1920.

The novel of The Maltese Falcon was serialised in five parts in Black Mask pulp magazine in 1929 and 1930, and then published as a book in 1930 by Alfred A Knopf, quickly snapped up and filmed by Warner Bros.

Also in the cast are Jerome Cowan, James Burke, Murray Alper, John Hamilton, Charles Drake, Chester Gan, Creighton Hale, Robert Homans, William Hopper, Hank Mann, Jack Mower and Emory Parnell.

Huston prepared the film and the script meticulously so that almost no line of dialogue was eliminated in the final cut. He retained much of the dialogue from the novel and shot the film in sequence, except for some exterior night shots, greatly helping the actors. It was shot on the Warner Bros backlot from 9 June 1941 to 18 July 1941, with reshoots on 8 August. After a preview on 5 September, studio head Jack L Warner wanted to simplify the opening scene and ordered reshoots on 10 September. This is done very efficiently. New client ‘Miss Ruth Wonderly’ tells her complicated tale to Sam Spade, at great speed. But then in to the office comes Spade’s detective partner Miles Archer, and Spade briefly and efficiently recaps her story in front of her. Then, we’re all up to speed.

The film premiered in New York City on October 3, 1941, was released on October 18, 1941 in the US, and was nominated for three Academy Awards: Best Picture, Sydney Greenstreet for Best Supporting Actor, and John Huston for Best Adapted Screenplay. It cost $375,000 and earned $967,000 US and $805,000 elsewhere.

Running time: 101 minutes.

Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor and Sydney Greenstreet join up again with their director John Huston for the entertaining but more routine 1942 Second World War spy movie Across the Pacific.

Sydney Greenstreet was nominated for Best Supporting Actor.

The great Greenstreet’s film career lasted a mere eight years. Of the only 24 movies he appeared in, nine were with Peter Lorre. Greenstreet had a great theatrical career before making his film debut when he was 62 years old and weighing nearly 300 pounds, as Kasper Gutman in the The Maltese Falcon. He acted in every major Shakespearean play and committed 12,000 lines of Shakespearean verse to memory.

Sam Spade was first offered to George Raft, who rejected the role because he did not want to work with an inexperienced director, and had a stipulation in his contract from making remakes. He preferred to make the forgotten comedy drama Manpower.

A model of the Maltese Falcon.

American artist Fred Sexton sculpted the Maltese Falcon statuette prop, based on the Kniphausen Hawk, a ceremonial pouring vessel made in 1697. Several 11.5-inch falcons props were made, one of them given to actor William Conrad by Jack L Warner. When it was auctioned in December 1994 for $398,500, it was the highest price paid for a film prop.

Cinematographer Arthur Edeson uses low-key lighting and odd angles to create noir visual excitement and menacing atmosphere. The seven-minute long scene where Spade and Gutman meet for the second time and Spade passes out because his drink is drugged is shot in a brio sequence of 22 meticulously planned, elaborate camera movements. Incidentally, contrary to legend, it was never done as one long, uncut shot.

Hammett’s defiantly non-PC novel portrays Cairo as gay and hints the same for Wilmer and Gutman. Spade calls Wilmer a ‘gunsel’ three times in the film, a word Hammett used in the novel after his book editor objected to ‘catamite’. Gunsel, from the Yiddish word for ‘little goose’, was a synonym for catamite but too new to be familiar. So Hammett could use it in his book, and it slipped past the Production Code censors in the screenplay. Because of The Maltese Falcon, the word came to take on ‘gunman’ as a secondary meaning.

Character actress Gladys George.

Hollywood character actress Gladys George (1900–1954) is probably best known for her role as Miles Archer’s wife Iva in The Maltese Falcon.

Red Harvest (filmed in 1930 as Roadhouse Nights) and City Streets (1931), based on a short story and starring Gary Cooper and Sylvia Sidney, preceded the 1931 The Maltese Falcon as Hammett movie adaptations.

Warner Bros produced the new 1936 version, Satan Met a Lady, starring Bette Davis, when they were unable to re-release the 1931 The Maltese Falcon in 1935 because of film censorship. The 1931 film follows the novel closely, including its references to homosexuality and a scene of Spade strip-searching Wonderly for a missing $1,000 bill, and the Motion Picture Production Code, refused to grant Warner Bros a re-release certificate.

The cast are Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade, Mary Astor as Ruth Wonderly/ Brigid O’Shaughnessy, Gladys George as Iva Archer, Peter Lorre as Joel Cairo, Barton MacLane as Lieutenant Dundy, Lee Patrick as Effie Perine, Sydney Greenstreet as Kasper Gutman, Ward Bond as Detective Tom Polhaus, Jerome Cowan as Miles Archer, Elisha Cook Jr. as Wilmer Cook, James Burke as hotel detective Luke, Murray Alper as taxi driver Frank Richman, John Hamilton as District Attorney Bryan, Walter Huston as Captain Jacoby, Charles Drake, Chester Gan, Creighton Hale, Robert Homans, William Hopper, Hank Mann, Jack Mower and Emory Parnell.

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