Everything about The Maltese Falcon 1941 Film totally explained
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The Maltese Falcon is a
1941 Warner Bros. film written and directed by
John Huston, based on the
novel of the same name by
Dashiell Hammett, and starring
Humphrey Bogart as
private investigator Sam Spade,
Mary Astor as his
femme fatale client,
Sydney Greenstreet in his film debut, and
Peter Lorre. The film was Huston's directorial debut and was nominated for three
Academy Awards.
The story concerns the entanglement of a San Francisco private investigator with three greedy, unscrupulous and murderous adventurers who compete with each other to obtain a fabulous jewel-encrusted statuette of a falcon worth millions.
The Maltese Falcon has been named as one of the greatest films of all time by
Roger Ebert, and
Entertainment Weekly, and was cited by
Panorama du Film Noir Américain, the French book that coined the term
film noir, as the first film of that genre.
The film premiered on
October 3,
1941 in
New York City and in
1989 was selected for inclusion in the
Library of Congress'
National Film Registry.
Background
The antihero protagonist of
Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, private investigator
Sam Spade, is based on the author's experiences as a private detective for the
Pinkerton Detective Agency in
San Francisco. Hammett not only invested Spade with characteristics drawn from his own personality but also gave him his own first name, Samuel, which Hammett had discarded when he launched his career as a writer.
Hammett also drew upon his years as a detective in creating many of the other characters for
The Maltese Falcon, which reworks elements from two of his stories published in
Black Mask magazine in 1925, "The Whosis Kid" and "The Gutting of Couffignal". The novel itself was serialized in five parts in
Black Mask in 1930 before being published in book form that same year by Alfred A. Knopf.
The 1941 film is the third film version of the novel.
The first, released in 1931, starred
Ricardo Cortez as Sam Spade, while the second, called
Satan Met a Lady, was a loose adaptation that turned the story into a light comedy, with the characters renamed. It was released in 1936 and starred
Warren William and a young
Bette Davis, only five years into her long film career.
Warner Brothers had been prevented by the
Hays Office censors from re-releasing the 1931 version due to its "lewd" content, which is possibly what caused them to go into production in 1941 with a new, cleaned-up version. (It wasn't until after 1966 that unedited copies of the 1931 film could legally be shown in the U.S.) Ironically, the 1941 film still managed to sneak some
homosexual innuendo past the censors.
Plot
"In 1539, the Knights Templar of Malta paid tribute to Charles V of Spain by sending him a Golden Falcon encrusted from beak to claw with rarest jewels -- but pirates seized the galley carrying this priceless token and the fate of the Maltese Falcon remains a mystery to this day."
In
San Francisco in
1941,
private investigators
Sam Spade (
Humphrey Bogart) and Miles Archer (
Jerome Cowan) meet a beautiful new client - Miss Ruth Wonderly (
Mary Astor) - who asks them to locate her missing sister, there with a man named Floyd Thursby. Wonderly is meeting Thursby and hopes her sister will be with him. After they receive a substantial retainer, Archer volunteers to follow her that night and help get her sister back.
That night, a call informs Spade that Archer has been shot and killed, but before he goes to the murder scene he tells his secretary Effie Perrine (
Lee Patrick) to break the news to Archer's wife, Iva (
Gladys George), and to keep her away from him. At the scene, police detective Tom Polhaus (
Ward Bond) shows Spade the murder weapon, a
rare English handgun. Spade tells Polhaus that Archer was tailing Thursby, but refuses to give any more information. Spade then calls Wonderly’s hotel but finds that she's checked out with no forwarding address.
Returning to his apartment, Spade is visited by Polhaus and his superior, Lt Dundy (
Barton MacLane), a tough and uncompromising cop. They grill Spade about the case he and Archer were working on but he refuses to name his client. They tell him that Thursby has been shot dead and suggest that Spade had time to do it.
The next morning Spade is visited by Iva who embraces him passionately, and asks if he killed Archer so that the two of them can be together — but Effie suggests to Spade the possibility that
Iva might be the killer. Spade meets with Wonderly - now calling herself Brigid O’Shaughnessy - and assures her that he's kept her identity secret from the police, but lets her know that he's aware the story about her sister was fake. She explains that Thursby was her partner, carried a gun and probably killed Archer, but claims to have no idea who killed Thursby. Spade agrees to find out who’s behind the killings, but makes her pay him most of the money she's on hand.
At his office, Spade meets Joel Cairo (
Peter Lorre), who offers him a $5,000 fee to find a “black figure of a bird”. When Spade is distracted, Cairo pulls a gun on him to search the office, but Spade knocks the gun away and knocks Cairo out. Spade goes through Cairo's possessions, inspecting his money and his three passports from different countries. When Cairo revives, he asks if Spade has the bird he's looking for, but Spade doesn't, so Cairo hires him to find it. They discuss terms until Cairo politely asks for his weapon back. He promptly turns it on Spade again to search the office, much to Spade's amusement.
Later that evening, Spade realizes that he's being followed and loses the man, then visits Brigid, telling her about his meeting with Cairo. They fence verbally, and Spade kisses her, but demands she tell him what's going on. They go to Spade’s apartment so that Brigid can meet with Cairo. When Cairo shows up, they grill each other about the black bird’s whereabouts, and Cairo becomes agitated when Brigid mentions that “the Fat Man” is in San Francisco. When Brigid insults Cairo, he tries to pull a gun on her, but Spade slaps him down.
The two police detectives show up at Spade's door wanting to talk, but he won't let them in. When they hear Cairo's cry for help from inside, they go in anyway and are told conflicting stories about what happened. Dundy wants to bring them all in, but Spade tells them they were being ribbed and Brigid and Cairo back him up. Cairo leaves, followed by the police, and Spade gets Brigid to tell him more about the black bird and herself, most of it apparently fabricated.
In the morning, Spade goes to Cairo's hotel, where he spots the man who's been following him sitting in the lobby. He speaks to him to send a message to the "Fat Man", but Wilmer (
Elisha Cook, Jr.) feigns ignorance and tells him to “shove off”, so Spade gets the house detective to throw Wilmer out. Cairo arrives, saying that he's been grilled by the police all night, but has stuck to Spade's "goofy" cover story.
When Spade returns to his office, he learns that Kasper Gutman (
Sydney Greenstreet), the "Fat Man", has gotten his message and wants to talk to him. After sending Brigid off with Effie for safekeeping, and cold-shouldering Iva, Spade goes to Gutman's hotel suite. Gutman greets Spade warmly, gives him a drink and begins to talk about the Falcon, but becomes deliberately evasive, causing Spade to put on an act of becoming violently angry. He smashes his glass and storms out, giving Gutman a deadline of 5:30 that evening to cooperate with him. As he goes into the elevator, we see Joel Cairo coming out of another one, on his way to Gutman's suite.
After being questioned by the District Attorney, and telling him off, Spade is accosted by Wilmer to take him to Gutman at gunpoint. Before they get to the hotel suite, Spade overpowers him, taking his weapons, and then humiliates him by handing the weapons over to Gutman. Gutman and Spade sit down to more drinks, while Gutman elaborately relates the checkered history of the Maltese Falcon, which ends with the Falcon in the home of a Russian general in
Istanbul. Gutman tried to buy it, but when the general refused to sell, Gutman sent in some "agents" to steal it. "Well, sir," Gutman says, "they got it, but I haven't got it."
Gutman offers Spade $25,000 for the bird, and one-fourth of the proceeds from its sale. Spade's vision blurs and he passes out on the floor: his drink has been spiked. Wilmer kicks Spade in the face in revenge for embarrassing him, and he and Gutman and Cairo (who has been in the other room) depart, leaving Spade alone and unconscious.
When Spade revives, he immediately calls Effie to talk to Brigid, and learns that she isn't with her. He searches Gutman's suite and finds a newspaper with the arrival time of the freighter
La Paloma from
Hong Kong circled. He goes to the dock but the ship is on fire. A dock officer informs him that the crew and passengers all got off safely, and he returns to his office.
Suddenly a man (
Walter Huston) bursts into the office, staggers toward Spade clutching a bundle wrapped in newspaper, and drops it, muttering “You know ... Falcon”. He collapses on the couch, dead. Spade inspects the dead man’s wallet and tells Effie that the man, who has been shot, is Captain Jacobi of the
La Paloma. Looking inside the bundle, Spade grabs Effie hard by the wrist and says "We’ve got it, angel. We’ve got it."
The phone rings, and the secretary hears Brigid give an address and then scream before the line goes dead. Spade directs her to call the police after he’s gone and tell them how the captain died but not to mention the package, which he takes to a bus terminal baggage room and checks, mailing the claim check to himself at a postal box.
After the address Brigid gave turns out to be an empty lot, Spade returns home and finds her hiding in a doorway near his apartment. He takes her inside, where he finds Gutman, Cairo and Wilmer waiting for him, guns drawn. Gutman gives Spade $10,000 for the Falcon, but Spade tells them that part of his price is a fall guy he can turn over to the police for the murders of Archer, Thursby and Captain Jacobi, getting himself off the hook. Spade suggests that Wilmer is the best choice, since he certainly killed Thursby and Jacobi at least. After some intense negotiation, Gutman and Cairo agree to sacrifice Wilmer, who is knocked out in a scuffle. Spade gets the details of what happened and who killed whom, so that he can present a convincing story to the police along with Wilmer.
Just after dawn, Spade calls Effie, who brings him the bundle. In a frenzy, Gutman, Cairo and Brigid unwrap it, revealing a black statuette: the Maltese Falcon. Gutman inspects the bird, and to make sure it's the real thing, he begins to scrape away the enamel coating with a penknife. Growing increasing agitated, he cuts faster and faster, and finally cries out, "It's a fake!"
Brigid adamantly insists that the bird is the same statuette she got from the Russian general, and Cairo explodes that it was Gutman's crude attempt to buy the bird that tipped off the general to its great value — he must have had a duplicate made for them to steal. "No wonder we'd such an easy time stealing it!"
Cairo breaks down and weeps while Gutman regains control of himself, suggesting that he and Cairo go to Istanbul to continue their quest. He demands at gunpoint that Spade return the money he's been paid, but allows him to keep $1,000 for his "time and expenses". Gutman invites Spade to join them, saying "You're a man of nice judgment and many resources", but Spade declines.
Gutman and Cairo leave, and Spade calls the police and tells them where to pick them, and Wilmer, up. Spade angrily confronts the frightened Brigid, telling her he knows she killed Archer to implicate Thursby, her unwanted accomplice. "Well," he adds, "if you get a good break, you’ll be out in 20 years and you can come back to me then. I hope they don’t hang you, precious, by that sweet neck."
Brigid can’t believe that Spade will turn her over to the police. "You killed Miles" he says, "and you're going over for it." She appeals to him and his love for her. Spade doesn’t argue, saying: "When a man’s partner’s killed he’s supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you’re supposed to do something about it."
Spade lets in the police and turns over the Falcon, the guns he's taken from Wilmer, Gutman and Cairo, the money Gutman gave him, which he says was a bribe for his silence, and last of all Brigid, explaining that she killed his partner. Brigid is taken away, and Polhaus picks up the statuette and asks what it is. Taking the Falcon, Spade replies, "The stuff that dreams are made of". Spade steps out into the hallway and sees Brigid staring vacantly through the bars of the elevator window as the film ends.
Cast
Production
Casting
First-time director John Huston was very careful when casting
The Maltese Falcon, but Humphrey Bogart wasn't the first choice to play Sam Spade. Producer
Hal Wallis initially offered the role to
George Raft, who rejected it because he didn't want to work with an inexperienced director. (Raft would go on turning down roles that Bogart would play and make famous, including the cynical hero of
Casablanca.) The 42-year-old Bogart was delighted, however, to play a highly ambiguous character who is both honorable and greedy. Huston was particularly grateful that Bogart had quickly accepted the role, and the film helped to consolidate their lifelong friendship and set the stage for later collaboration on such films as
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948);
Key Largo (1948); and
The African Queen (1951). Bogart's convincing interpretation became the archetype for a private detective in the
film noir genre, providing him near-instant acclaim and rounding and solidifying his onscreen persona. It was
The Maltese Falcon that
Ingrid Bergman watched over and over again while preparing for
Casablanca, in order to learn to interact and act with Bogart. (The appellation "Fat Man" for Gutman was created for the film - in the novel, although he's a fat man, he's referred to as "G.")
The character of Joel Cairo was based on a criminal Hammett captured for robbing Pinkerton’s in 1920 in
Washington D.C. In Hammett's novel, the character is blatantly
homosexual, but to avoid problems with the censors this was downplayed considerably, although he's still noticeably
effeminate — for instance, Cairo's calling cards and handkerchiefs are scented with
gardenias, he fusses about his clothes and becomes hysterical when blood from a scratch ruins his shirt, and he makes subtle
fellating gestures with his cane during his interview with Spade. By contrast, in the novel Cairo is referred to as "
queer" and "the fairy". The film is one of many of the era that, because of the
Hays Office, could only hint at homosexuality. It is referenced in
The Celluloid Closet, a documentary about how films deal with homsexuality.
Elisha Cook Jr., a well-known
character actor was cast by Huston as the henchman Wilmer. According to Huston, Cook “lived alone up in the High Sierra, tied flies and caught golden trout between films. When he was wanted in Hollywood, they sent word up to his mountain cabin by courier. He would come down, do a picture, and then withdraw again to his retreat.” Like Cairo (and even Gutman) the character of Wilmer has also been seen by many commentators as homosexual, primarily because of the use of "gunsel", meaning a young homosexual in a relationship with an older man, to describe him.
Gladys George had made her mark on
Broadway with her starring role in
Lawrence Riley's
Personal Appearance (
1934) (adapted for the screen in
1936 as
Go West, Young Man); this comedy's huge success had been credited in great part to her comic performance. Her role as Archer's wife thus displays her versatility.
The unbilled appearance of the great character actor Walter Huston, in a small cameo role as the freighter captain who delivers the Falcon to Spade’s office, was done as a good luck gesture for his son, John Huston, on his directorial debut. The elder Huston had to promise Jack Warner that he wouldn't demand a dime for his little role before he was allowed to stagger into Spade’s office.
Preparation
During his preparation for
The Maltese Falcon, first-time director John Huston planned each second of the film to the very last detail, tailoring the screenplay with instructions to himself for a shot-for-shot setup, with sketches for every scene, so filming could proceed fluently and professionally. Like other directors, such as
Alfred Hitchcock, Huston was adamant that the film keep to schedule, and that everything was methodically planned to the fullest to ensure that the film never went over budget. By providing the cast with a highly detailed script, Huston was able to let them rehearse their scenes with very little intervention.
Such was the extent and efficacy of his preparation of the script that almost no line of dialog was eliminated in the final edit of the film. Except for some exterior night shots, Huston shot the entire film in sequence, which greatly helped his actors create their characters. The shooting went so smoothly that there was actually extra time for the cast to enjoy themselves, and Huston brought Bogart, Astor, Bond, Lorre and others to the Lakeside Golf Club near the Warner lot to relax in the pool, dine, drink and talk until midnight about anything other than the film they were working on.
Huston used much of the dialog from the original novel, removing all references to sex which the
Hays Office had deemed to be unacceptable. The many "by gad"'s Greenstreet utters in the movie were inserted by the censors to replace "by God". Huston was also warned not to show excessive drinking. The director fought this, on the grounds that Spade was a man who put away a half bottle of hard liquor a day and showing him completely abstaining from
alcohol would mean seriously falsifying his character.
Production Credits
- Associate Producer - Henry Blanke
- Director of Photography - Arthur Edeson
- Dialogue director - Robert Foulk
- Film Editor - Thomas Richards
- Art Director - Robert M. Haas
- Sound - Oliver S. Garretson
- Gowns - Orry-Kelly
- Makeup Artist - Perc Westmore (credited) and Frank McCoy (uncredited)
- Music - Adolph Deutsch
- Musical Director - Leo F. Forbstein
- Production Management - Al Alleborn (uncredited)
- Assistant Director - Claude Archer (uncredited)
- Script supervisor - Meta Carpenter (uncredited)
- Orchestrator - Arthur Lange (uncredited)
Cinematography
With its low-key lighting and inventive and arresting angles, the work of Director of Photography
Arthur Edeson is one of the film’s great assets. Unusual camera angles – sometimes low to the ground, revealing the ceilings of rooms (a technique also used by
Orson Welles and his cinematograher
Gregg Toland on
Citizen Kane) – are cleverly utilized, and emphasize the nature of the characters and their actions. Some of the most technically striking scenes involve Gutman, especially the scene where he explains the history of the Falcon to Spade, purposely drawing out his story so that the knockout drops he's slipped into Spade’s drink will take effect.
Film critic Roger Ebert says of this scene:
Was the shot just a stunt? Not at all; most viewers don't notice it because they're swept along by its flow. And consider another shot, where Greenstreet chatters about the falcon while waiting for a drugged drink to knock out Bogart. Huston's strategy is crafty. Earlier, Greenstreet has set it up by making a point: "I distrust a man who says 'when.' If he's got to be careful not to drink too much, it's because he's not to be trusted when he does." Now he offers Bogart a drink, but Bogart doesn't sip from it. Greenstreet talks on, and tops up Bogart's glass. He still doesn't drink. Greenstreet watches him narrowly. They discuss the value of the missing black bird. Finally, Bogart drinks, and passes out. The timing is everything; Huston doesn't give us closeups of the glass to underline the possibility that it's drugged. He depends on the situation to generate the suspicion in our minds. (This was, by the way, Greenstreet's first scene in the movies.)
The film has been named as one of the greatest films of all time by Roger Ebert), was chosen as #14 on the AFI's list of top movie quotes in cinematic history.
The Maltese Falcon (1941) has been deemed "culturally significant" by the Library of Congress and in 1989 was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. On May 18, 1950, another adaptation was broadcast on The Screen Guild Theater starring Bogart and his wife Lauren Bacall. In addition, there was an adaptation on Lux Radio Theater on February 8, 1943, starring Edward G. Robinson, Gail Patrick, and Laird Cregar.
In 1975, Columbia released a spoof of The Maltese Falcon called The Black Bird, starring George Segal as Sam Spade, Jr., with Patrick and Cook reprising their roles as Effie and Wilmer from the 1941 version. In 1974, during production for this film, one of the seven plaster figurines of the original 1941 Falcon on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was stolen, and it was alleged that the “disappearance” of the figurine was staged as a publicity stunt for the Segal film. If it was, it backfired, since news accounts of the missing Falcon exceeded those of the Segal film.
In 1988, the film was parodied in "The Big Goodbye," a first-season episode of . Captain Jean-Luc Picard, played by Patrick Stewart, is a fan of detective stories of the early 20th Century, including the fictional Dixon Hill, a stand-in for Sam Spade. In a holodeck simulation, Picard-as-Hill is opposed by Cyrus Redblock, whose name is a play on "Sydney Greenstreet." Redblock is looking for "the item," which is never identified, but is meant to stand in for the Falcon.
There is a homage to the film in Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, a made-for-TV movie that gained some notoriety by being mocked on Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Famed Marvel Comics supervillain the Kingpin is also supposedly based on Sydney Greenstreet's character of Kasper Gutman.
In an episode of Get Smart that parodies the film, Maxwell Smart travels to Mexico on a case to find the Tequila Mockingbird, a parody of the title To Kill a Mockingbird.
An episode from the first season of The Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries is called The Maltese Canary and the title card is in black-and-white colors. The character of Sam Spade also stars in the episode, and his place as a detective is taken over by Granny until his return from a tournament.
An episode of entitled "Perchance To Dream" features Batman quoting the line, "The stuff dreams are made of."
Production details
The revolver used to shoot Miles is correctly identified by Spade as a Webley-Fosbery. The Webley was an experiment to get a handgun to automatically reload and cock itself between shots. Unlike a typical semi-automatic pistol with a moving slide, this was a revolver that used its backward momentum to cock the hammer and rotate the cylinder, readying it for the next pull of the trigger. Webleys are rare and considered very valuable by collectors. There was an eight shot .38 calibre version (unusual in itself as most revolvers carry six, or occasionally five, rounds), and a six-shot .455 calibre version. In the film, the .455 version was incorrectly described as the eight shot weapon and the name mispronounced as "Foresby".
Contrary to popular belief, Bogart (as Spade) doesn't wear a trench coat in this film, although he does wear an unbelted wool overcoat in outdoor scenes. The popular association of the trench coat with Bogart began when he wore the item in Casablanca.
Ronson "Touch Tip" lighters are used throughout the film. These lighters, popular in the 1930s and early 1940s, came in a variety of configurations.Further Information
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