The Maltese Falcon (1931)

User Rating:

7.4/10   

Director:

Roy Del Ruth

Writers:

Dashiell Hammett (novel)
Maude Fulton (screenplay) ...

Release Date:

13 June 1931 (USA)

Genre:

Action | Drama | Romance

Plot:

A lovely dame with dangerous lies employs the services of a private detective, who is quickly caught up in the mystery and intrigue of a statuette known as the Maltese Falcon.

Plot Keywords:

Private Detective | Statuette | Money | Detective | Secretary

Cast

Bebe Daniels	...	Ruth Wonderly
Ricardo Cortez	...	Sam Spade
Dudley Digges	...	Casper Gutman
Una Merkel	...	Effie Perrine
Robert Elliott	...	Police Lt. Dundy
Thelma Todd	...	Iva Archer
Otto Matieson	...	Dr. Joel Cairo
Walter Long	...	Miles Archer
Dwight Frye	...	Wilmer Cook
J. Farrell MacDonald	...	Det. Sgt. Tom Polhaus

Also Known As:

Dangerous Female (USA) (TV title)

Runtime:

80 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (Western Electric Sound System)

Certification:

Norway:16

Company:

Warner Bros. Pictures

Trivia:

Although not visible until the final reel, a portrait of Louise Brooks hangs in Spades apartment, above his telephone.

Goofs:

Continuity: Visiting Wonderly, Spade finds that she has been reading a book. In close-up, its title is shown as "The Strange Case of the Little Black Bird", with a picture of the eponymous falcon on the jacket. But in other shots, it is "Famous Criminals and their Trials" (possibly the 1926 book by Sidney Theodore Felstead), with human portraits on the jacket.

Quotes:

[first lines]
Sam Spade: Bye-bye, honey. I'll see you later... Effie!

Movie Connections:

Referenced in "The X Files: The Pine Bluff Variant (#5.18)" (1998)

Not bad first version (which John Huston must have seen!)

This is a fascinating version of the story definitively filmed ten years later by John Huston, because of the ways in which it comes close to capturing the Hammett novel-- and the ways in which it doesn't. As a pre-Code film it's often more explicit than the Huston version-- especially about the fact that Spade was having an affair with his partner's wife, and about the homosexuality of the male crooks (this movie's Gutman is plainly depicted as a seedy john rather than as the refined aesthete Sydney Greenstreet would play). But hardboiled attitude is what really matters, and Ricardo Cortez (a good early talkie actor who always tried hard) just isn't playing Hammett's hardboiled, unsentimental Spade-- he's playing the more typical suave gentleman detective of the period, like Philo Vance. As a result, it's the love affair with Ms. Wonderly that takes over, and the shocking bite of Hammett's ending is lost. It was capturing the Hammett worldview that was John Huston's great accomplishment, and that made his Falcon so influential over the films noir to follow.

All the same Huston, who was working at Warner Bros. when this was made, must have liked something about this movie-- the scene where Spade first meets Joel Cairo (Otto Mattiesen, doing an excellent Peter Lorre imitation years before the fact) is repeated almost shot for shot and inflection for inflection in the Huston version, the only such case of direct inspiration I spotted here. Mattiesen, a familiar silent era character actor, sadly died not long after the film came out; had he lived he certainly could have had as interesting a talkie career as Lorre eventually did.