CANON OF FILM: "THE MALTESE FALCON" (Huston)

THE MALTESE FALCON (1941)

Director: John Huston

Screenplay: John Huston based on the novel by Dashiell Hammett

  

For reasons that I'll discuss some other time, I haven't been watching any movies, or frankly, anything of note, for a little while now. It's been dark for me lately, and I know I have to eventually get out of this funk, and I think I'm finally starting to get out of it. But in the meantime, I gotta start somewhere and I've stayed up late a lot of nights lately, and there's only one movie I really want to watch at this late an hour. They don't really have a late show anymore like the old TV networks used to, but this is the movie I think of when I think of watching a movie that late, and somehow, I noticed that I never talked about it here before.

Kinda strange, "The Maltese Falcon" is genuinely one of my favorite films, and I think it's one of the all-time best; I've listed on my Top Ten Lists I make periodically to parallel Sight & Sound's once-a-decade list twice. I guess I thought I'd already done the Canon of Film for this film, or perhaps I just didn't know what else to say about it. You ever watch a movie so often that it becomes impossible to truly talk about? To me, "The Maltese Falcon", isn't just one of the all-time seminal films, it's the perfect late night movie. When you're up at like two or three in the morning and you can't sleep, and you're looking for a late night show to get engrossed in and help you relax, "The Maltese Falcon" is the movie I'm hoping is on. It's got all the great pulp images and motifs that late night films on television were made for: a cold private eye with a symbolic name, a femme fatale who's trying to desperately hold her lips shut while spreading her legs wide, (Symbolically, at least), thieves, murderers, and of course, the stuff that dreams are made of.

It's kind of a forgotten footnote now, but on the same lot that Orson Welles was creating "Citizen Kane" another first-time filmmaker was also reinventing cinema as we know, and he did it, with an unusual work, one that had already been adapted into film, not once, but twice before already. I've seen the original "The Maltese Falcon", directed by Roy Del Ruth, a decent early director, but it's nothing too special, although they stay as close to the same story as this one, only it tries to turn it into a love story at the end. It's also, just not got the proper tone and tense for the Dashiell Hammett novel. They tried again with an even stranger and more surreal film, called "Satan Met a Lady", directed by William Dieterle, who is a better director than Del Ruth, but his better work came later, and this was a weird film. It's got Bette Davis at the peak of her power in it, but despite changing most everything, it's got most of the elements the same, and it is just bizarre and weird; it's kind of a fun awful, but it's- it's awful. (Bette Davis was right, she got a lot of really terrible scripts) There's an explanation for this, remember Dashiell Hammett basically invented the hard-boiled detective story, which-, people kinda forget this now, but the entire detective and mystery genre is much newer, than people realize, and the modern hard-boiled American detective subgenre was just getting being created by people like Hammett and Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain,... a few others around this time, and through film, it would eventually morph into the film noir, however, Hammett's only real good film adaptation up 'til this point was one of his more light and comedic detective tale, "The Thin Man". Part of this was trying to maneuver the subjects of his novels around the censors, and "The Maltese Falcon," does have a lot of symbolism around the edges of the screen, that we have to kinda pick up on, in order to circumvent the Hays Code censors. So, this is why both previous film adaptation, feel like they're trying to be some lighter variant of like a Sherlock Holmes tales, ("Satan Met a Lady", especially feels like it's trying to be one of the really frivolous one.) John Huston knew the tone he needed, and that involved taking from the German Expression filmmakers use of darkness and shadows, and well as somebody in the lead as Sam Spade, who can keep Hammett's sharp wit and cynical awareness, but to play the absurd aspects of the story straight. 

Despite being a first-time director, John Huston was the son of the great actor Walter Huston, he even later directed his father to an Oscar in "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" and since he was making this movie on the cheap, he had some leniency on the film. He casted mostly then-unknown actors, at least in Hollywood at the time, and that includes Humphrey Bogart, who was known for sporadic supporting work on stage and occasionally on screen at the time; this film made him an A-list star, starting off a long career of playing some of the silver screens best anti-heroes.

Bogart was best as anti-heroes like Sam Spade, and when he got this part, he became an A-list actor able to get roles later in films like “Casablanca,” “The Big Sleep,” “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” “The African Queen,” etc. etc. Here, his partner, Miles Archer (Jerome Cowan) is killed, and he barely notices. In almost no time he has changed the office door, and has slept with his partner’s widow, who he was already having an affair with. Like, I said, Hays Code, reading between the lines; in fact when the film was given to the Hays board, they had there fair share of complaints originally with the screenplay, and then later with the film itself, like, this you can find the the original script with the red pen scratching out what was obscene still, and this is one they really battered with, which forced some reediting to occur, but Huston still got a lot through. Pay close attention to every slight and bizarre detail. It enhances the story to know that Peter Lorre’s Joel Cairo has a business card that smells like gardenias, or why he strangely position the top of his cane so close to his mouth while talking. Is that why Bogart beat him up in his office? Not really, but it certainly wouldn’t have stopped him from doing it.

Along with Bogart’s tough guy image, we also get comedy from his wit, not just verbally but in his actions. There’s a running joke in the movie how Gutman’s henchman always get there guns stolen from Spade, even though he usually gives them back to him. There's a lot of acting in the film from Bogart, and also from Sam Spade as well. The other films showcase this aspect too, but they play it up too much, Bogart's version of Spade, casually throws those lines away. There's an early sequence where Bogart's Sam Spade is angrily leaving a room after confronting Gutman (Oscar-nominee Sydney Greenstreet, in his first film role), and then, once he finishes storming out and making a scene, he slams the door, mid-sprint, and then just starts casually walking towards us like he's taking a stroll through the park, with a sly smile on his film.

The film is considered the first, and in my opinion the best film noir ever made. I’ve watched this film about a dozen or so times, and I’m always surprised by one thing or another in it. There’s a scene where Spade is having a drink with Sydney Greenstreet’s Gutman, and it never fails to surprise me what happens at the end of the scene, especially because Huston chooses not to outline what really important in the scene, even though it shouldn’t be hard to figure it out. Upon my tenth viewing, I realized that everything Mary Astor’s Brigid O’Shaughnessy says in the film is basically a lie, which makes her character’s closure a little more satisfying because as the audience as we hate being fooled by a character as much as she fools with us, although Spade is a little more indifferent to her than we are. Watching it again, I realize why the film works so well, is how wonderfully side-eyed Bogart is at anything she says, just completely not buying any of the over-praising, over-indulging, especially those lines about how she isn't the "good girl" that she was claiming to be. (Those lines were probably twice as funny at the time if you know about Mary Astor's well-publicized personal troubles. [She wasn't the biggest star, although "Dodsworth", her big breakout film, had come up a few years earlier, but this was coming off her diaries being released as apart of a long and lurid divorce/custody battle, so her, even pretending to be the "good girl" even in the beginning, like everyone in the audience would be thinking, just how much she was not a good girl.... Although I should say she did ultimate win custody and that case, but people forget that, and like to fawn over what was in those so-called "Purple Diaries.)]

I think that's what really separates "The Maltese Falcon", in nearly all the other great film noirs, the femme fatales, are taken pretty seriously as the fatal women that they are, whether they're in on the crime(s) going on, or are just innocent bystanders around them. That doesn't mean they're lesser or those movies are lesser, that's what makes some of those are great films still hold up after all this time, but Bogart just calling off her shit every time,- while she perfectly acts as this wonderfully bad actress that she's trying to be for him. This is why turning this film into a real romance never works. Everyone's working everyone all the time, trying to find cinema's most famous MaGuffin; it's just perfect that it not only doesn't fall into that trap, but it's almost making fun of us for even having that trap to fall into. 

My favorite line: "You're good, you're very good," Spade chuckles as he observes Brigid being very bad.